Full text of "Inside Europe"

See other formats

INSIDE EUROPE

INSIDE

EUROPE

AGAIN COMPLETELY REVISED

By JOHN GUNTHER

HARPER & BROTHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

INSIDE EUROPE

Printed in the United States of America
All rights m this book are reserved.
No part of the book may be reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written per-
mission. For information address
Harper & Brothers

PRINTED FROM NEW PLATES

r-TT

Printed and Bound by

The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., Scranton, Penna.

To My Wife
In Love and Friendship

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface — ix

Bibliographical Note — xi
Introduction — xiil

Chapter

I. Hitler— 1

II. Psychopathology of Dictators — 20

III. Who Killed the German Republic^ — 30

IV. The Trick by Fire and the Purge by Blood — 42

V. The Two G-Men — 60

VI. The Other Little Hitlers — 71

VII. War, Peace, Policy, and Cash — 82

VIII. The Fascist Offensive — 1 00

IX. From Munich to Warsaw — 1 1 9

X. Daladierand Blum — 145

XI. French Policy — and Why — 1 66

XII. More About Frenchmen— 1 82

XIII. Fascism and the Front Populaire— 200

XIV. The Spanish Civil War — 21 3

XV. Mussolini— 235

XVI. Who Else in Italy-?— 255

XVII. War in Abyssinia — 268

XVIII. England: The Ruling Classes— 282

XIX. The Abdication Crisis — 296

XX. Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill— 309

XXI. Men of Whitehall— 334

XXII. Left and Right in England — 355
XXIII. De Valera— 366

XXIV. Danube Blues — 377

XXV. The February Tragedy — 387

XXVI. Death of Dollfuss— 397
XXVII. Austria Infelix — 41 3

XXVIII. Hungary and Dr. Habsburg— 41 8

XXIX. Masaryk and Benes — 428

XXX. Carol, Lupescu, and Rumania— 438

XXXI. Jugoslavia After Alexander — 453
XXXII. Balkan Kings— 468

XXXIII. The Turkish Colossus — 477
XXXIV. Poland and the Baltic States — 484
XXXV. The Notable Neutralsr-496
XXXVL Half a League Onward — 507

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter

XXXVII. Stalin— 516
XXXVIII. Men Around Stalin— 536
XXXIX. The Russian Trials— 552
XL **Duranty‘s Inferno”— 562

Acknowledgments and Bibliography— 576
Index— 581

Preface

THIS book is written from a definite point of view. It is that the
■ accidents of personality play a great role in history. As Bertrand
Russell says, the Russian revolution might not have occurred without
Lenin, and modern European development would have been very dif-
ferent if Bismarck had died as a child. The personality of Karl Marx
himself has powerfully influenced the economic interpretation of history.
Important political, religious, demographic, nationalist, as well as eco-
nomic factors are not, I believe, neglected in this book. But its main
trend is personal.

The fact may be an outrage to reason, but it cannot be denied : unre-
solved personal conflicts in the lives of various European politicians may
contribute to the collapse of our civilization. This is the age of great
dictatorial leaders ; millions depend for life or death on the will of Hitler,
Mussolini, Stalin. Never have politics been so vital and dynamic as
to-day, and so pervasively obtrusive in nonpolitical affairs. The politicians
usurp other fields. What fictional drama can compare with the dramatic
reality of Mussolini's career? What literary craftsman ever wrote his-
tory as Trotsky both wrote and made it? What books in the realm of
art have had the sale or influence of Hitler's Mein Kampf?

These men and their lesser contemporaries — French politicians like
Daladier and Blum, crude and boisterous adventurers of the type of
Goering, nationalist officers like General Franco, British leaders like
Chamberlain and Churchill, Balkan kings like Carol — ^are playing deci-
sive roles in the stupendous drama of Europe at war. It is very difficult
to explore usefully the private lives of these men. This is not a peephole
book. It contains no gossip for gossip's sake. But it tries to tell the
intimate story of these leaders, the personal sources of their power, the
reasons for their impact on history. Who are these men who would
dominate our lives ?

The book begins with Hitler, then makes a tour around him. I have
tried to note the impingement of Hitler's Germany on every European
country, and to include an analysis of every important European crisis
and situation. We visit, in a counterclockwise circle, France, Spain, Italy;
make a detour upward to that dominant island, England, proceed

PREFACE

through the deceased states of Central Europe and the battered sur-
vivors of the Balkans; finish the circle around Germ^y with what
was once Poland; visit Scandinavia and the neutral states briefly;
inspect what we have seen of Western Europe at Geneva; and emerge
finally in the Soviet Union.

J.G.

Bibliographical Note

INSIDE EUROPE was first written in the summer and autumn of

1935 ^ and published in both the United States and England in Jan-
uary, 1936. Since that time it has been revised and republished so
frequently that a word of explanation is perhaps necessary.

The original American edition is designated on the back of the title
page with the key letters A-L to H-L inclusive. In March, 1936 I wrote
a new preface, carrying on events ; oddly enough I finished this preface
on the very day that Hitler marched into the Rhineland. Soon there-
after — ^in May, 1936 — ^another new preface became necessary, although
the original text of the book was unchanged.

In the late summer of 1936 my publishers suggested that I rewrite
considerable portions of the book, so as to bring it up to date more
comprehensively. This was an adventurous undertaking to which I
gladly agreed. So in October, 1936, the first completely revised and
reset edition appeared. I eliminated some material that had already
become outdated, made numerous minor changes, added new sections
on the Rhineland crisis and the Ethiopian war, and wrote two entirely
new chapters, one on Leon Blum, one on De Valera. This edition was
called simply the ^'Revised Edition,” and is identified by the key letters
I-L through M-L.

In February, 1937 a new chapter was inserted in this edition, dealing
with the Simpson crisis and the abdication of King Edward VIII.

The pressure of European events increased, the march of the groan-
ing continent continued. In the autumn of 1937 I undertook another
complete revision, which was published in the last days of that year.
This was called the “New 1938 Edition,” and was identified by the
initials K-M to F-N inclusive. It was the 39th printing since first publica-
tion. This '"1938 Edition” was fully reset and published anew. It con-
tained a map, 800 textual revisions and about 30,000 new words, with
new chapters on the Russian treason trials, the neutral states (which I
had hitherto neglected), the war in Spain, and Neville Chamberlain.

Various minor changes were made during 1938, while I was absent
in Asia. One series of editions contained illustrations ; they were sub-
sequently dropped. In the spring of 1938, after the seizure of Austria,
my publishers added footnotes here and there.

xii BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

After the Munich crisis, in October, 1938, I wrote two new chap-
ters, which were promptly incorporated into the book. One was a dis-
cussion of the Austrian and Czechoslovak crises, called ‘‘The Fascist
Offensive’’ ; one was a new introduction summarizing the events of the
year. This edition containing these new chapters, numbered K-N to L-O,
and marking the Soth printing since original publication, was called the
“Peace” Edition.

From that time until the present, events came so quickly that a new
comprehensive revision was impossible. Now, after the outbreak of
war, I have attempted it. The present edition, known as the
“War Edition,” is again — ^for the third time — completely rewritten
and reset. I have made multitudinous additions and subtractions, with
about 2,000 textual changes and perhaps 20,000 new words. (When
Inside Europe was first published in 1936 it was 180,000 words long;
it now runs to about 265,000.) I have included new sections on Daladier
and Churchill, new material on almost every country, and a new chapter
on the events from Munich to the invasion of Poland. There is also
a brief introduction summarizing events since the outbreak of war.

Despite all these changes, insertions, subtractions, revisions, and
additions, the essential structure and point of view of Inside Europe
have remained unchanged. It still begins with Hitler, it still ends
with Stalin. During the unprecedented turbulence and dynamism of
the last five years, I have naturally had to modify some early opinions,
but basically the book conforms still to the structure I first gave it.

As I write this I feel that I will never revise Inside Europe again.
The war brings new perspectives. I hope, however, to add a brief
preface or introduction each year. But the present edition will be the
last, I think, to be completely rewritten and reset.

Since its first appearance Inside Europe has been published in four-
teen countries. It has been translated into French, German, Spanish
(two Spanish editions exist), Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Swedish,
Norwegian, Danish, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, Jugoslav, and Esto-
nian. Parts of it have appeared in other languages.

I G.

Introduction

IN SEPTEMBER, 1939, the catastrophe of war again descended on
■ shaken Europe. No one wanted this war. In the tremendous week
from August 21 to August 27 I flew from Moscow to London, stopping
off in the Baltic and Scandinavian states. I kept watching the frontiers^
From the air you can’t tell where Russia stops, where Latvia starts.
You can’t tell the difference, crossing from Sweden to Denmark t(^
Germany to Holland, between one country and the next. The greenish
brown fields, the red brick houses, the slate roofs, are the same.
They all seem part of a common whole, a common organism. You
can’t tell frontiers apart — from the air. But you certainly have to learn
to tell them apart, on earth.

In the stormy summer of 1939 I visited eighteen European coun-
tries. I circumnavigated Germany, which means going to thirteen
different states, and I spent some time in Germany itself, in the Soviet
Union, and in Great Britain. Ever3nvhere the common people wanted
peace. The shopkeepers in Amsterdam and Cologne; the peasants har-
vesting wheat from Belgium to Estonia — ^they wanted peace. In Latvia
and Poland I talked to housewives, to telegraph clerks, to waiters in the
coffee houses; they wanted peace. Flying across the Baltic I stopped
for a moment in a Finnish town ; the pretty girls on that golden beach
wanted peace; so did the shipmasters in their old schooners. Every-
where, in every country, the common people wanted peace. They didn’t
want war. But war was what they got.

Nor did any European government want war. The British govern-
ment certainly did not want war. Nor did the French government.
Nor did the Polish government. Nor, I think, did the German gov-
ernment. Up to the very last moment,^ it seems reasonably clear,
Hitler thought that he could — once more — ^manufacture an enormous
crisis, bluff his way through it, and emerge with victory without having
to fight. He thought that by the Russo-German pact he could frighten
the British off, nip Danzig away from Poland, and retire triumphantly
without conflict. Ilitler did not want war. He must know that, by all
the imperatives of reason, war will destroy him. What he wanted was

^ The Polish crisis and events leading up to the outbreak of the war are described
in Chapter IX below, a new chapter m this edition.

xiii

xiv INTRODUCTION

victory without war. His whole prestige rested on the concept o
victory without war.

Why, then, did war come? First, because Hitler made his colossa
miscalculation. Such a miscalculation was, however, inevitable fron
the nature of the Nazi movement. Hitler became a prisoner of forcei
stronger than he was. He had to expand, or burst. He built his owi
d3mamics ; they swept him on.

Second, war came because the British decided to resist. They de
cided to resist, I think, for three main reasons : (a) ‘‘fed-upness” witi
the recurring Hitler crises, a feeling that even warfare was bettei
than the intolerable assault on nerves and the disruption of all norma
activity that each fresh crisis brought; (b) realization that, if Hitlei
took Danzig, the whole of Poland would go next, and after tha
whatever Hitler chose to grab, until all Europe might be his ; (c) forme]
British weakness. Because the British had previously been weak, i.
was doubly necessary to be strong.

The war was not popular, though the British faced it with stubbort
grimness. No war can be popular nowadays. People know too much. The]
remember the last war, which ended only twenty-one short years ago
They remember slogans like “Save the World for Democracy” and “Th<
War to End War.” They cannot so readily believe in slogans thij
time. Almost the most astonishing thing I saw in London during th(
first weird month of war was a brass band — astonishing because iti
martial music, normally something to be taken for granted, seemec
strangely out of place. There was no Rupert Brooke in 1939. There
was no glamour left to warfare.

The British are a decent, a kindly, a humanitarian, an intensel)
civilized folk; they know that war costs much, and that it may settle
little; they abhor the pain, the suffering, the tremendous human dis
location that this war — or any war — ^must bring. Nevertheless, the)
had to fight. They fought with grim and even bitter determination
Germany was unified by the feeling that Britain sought to destro)
Germany. Britain was unified by the conviction that no peace, no la\v
and order, no fruitful development of national life, no security foi
small or big states, no decency in international relations, was possible
until Hitlerism was destroyed.

INTRODUCTION

So war began — ^and surely it was the strangest war ever fought any-
where, at least in its first few months. Inspect the picture: massive
armies were locked in naked embrace on the Western Front, and scarcely
moved an inch. Enormous masses of men, with their inordinate cargoes
of munitions, tiptoed toward action as if on eggshells. The great capital
cities were blacked out against air raids that did not come.

The reason for this somber inactivity in the west was surely not
far to seek. Neither side dared to attack the other frontally, with
artillery and infantry in the conventional manner, because of the terri-
ble losses a major offensive would entail. The Maginot and Siegfried
lines are probably the strongest positions any army ever faced. General
Gamelin could have smashed through the Westwall if he had been willing
to lose a million men. But no nation nowadays can risk such appalling
casualties. Finally, there was the question of man power. Late in 1939
the British and French were still outnumbered in the west. But a big
offensive, to have even a remote chance of success, needs great superior-
ity on the part of the attacking force. Therefore the French and British
had to wait,

London expected catastrophic and cataclysmic air raids almost at once.
The first sirens blew twenty-two minutes after Mr. Chamberlain declared
that a state of war existed. In London alone, the hospitals were cleared
to take care of 300,000 casualties in the first week. But neither side
bombed the great western cities. Indeed the war in the air was fought,
in the first few months at least, with extraordinary politeness, with
gloves on as it were. British aviators mapped the entire Siegfried line,
at times flying for miles at a very low altitude indeed, without being
molested In fact German troops waved them on cheerfully. German
pilots, who took part in raids on British naval bases in Scotland, said
that they were subject to courtmartial and the death penalty if — ^by
some error — ^they bombed open towns.

There were several reasons why the great cities were not bombed.
From the British side one may mention three. First, the early raids on
military objectives, like that at Kiel the second night of the war,
caused severe losses. It became clear that in a major raid the attacking
force would lose between 20 and 30 per cent of its planes. The British
could not risk such losses, since the German air force has about a

xvi

INTRODUCTION

10 to 7 superiority over British and French air fleets combined. But
time will, it is presumed, redress this disadvantage; therefore it was
good sense on the part of the British to wait. Second, the British did
not want to risk bombing civilians, and they knew that in a big bom-
bardment some women and children were bound to get hit. Third,
the British feared retaliation. They did not bomb Germany because
they did not want to get bombed themselves.

The Germans did not begin serious assaults on British cities for
similar reasons. They too hated to risk precious planes. They too hesi-
tated to provoke retaliation. Besides, during the first months of the war,
German plans were based on the idea of a ‘‘peace offensive.’’ They
hoped to persuade the British to call off the war. Therefore they would
not risk inflaming Britain by severe raids. They used the threat of attack
as a weapon with which they hoped to force peace.

I cannot, at this date (December 22, 1939), pretend to make any
detailed or exhaustive history of the first months of the war. That
task must await better perspective. It may, however, be useful to sketch
briefly some main events. The body of this edition of Inside Europe
is completely revised up to and including the outbreak of the war. It
carries the story of each country into the autumn of 1939. In this
addendum I wish merely to say a further word about the war itself.

The German invasion of Poland began at dawn on September i. The
campaign was fierce and brilliant. It was a real Blitzkrieg, For years we
had heard of the professional skill and competence of the Reichswehr,
and of the tremendous potentialities of Marshal Goering’s huge air
fleet. We now saw what it could do. What it did was plenty. The Poles
were badly led, isolated from all assistance, and pitifully incompetent ;
nevertheless, the German campaign was a masterpiece. Nothing quite
like it has ever been seen in military history.

First, the Germans attacked by air power the chief airdromes in
Poland, all but obliterating them in the first forty-eight hours. This
meant that the Poles had practically no liaison, no opportunity to
counter-attack, no communication. Second, the German air fleet un-
mercifully bombed Polish railway stations and lines, which frustrated
Polish mobilization. Third, three highly mechanized German armies
attacked from three directions. General von Kluge with twenty divi-
sions nipped oflF the Corridor from the northwest and presently met

INTRODUCTION

xvii

a second army which struck toward Warsaw from East Prussia. Mean-
time, von Runstedt’s force of thirty-five divisions hammered toward
Kattowitz, Cracow and Tarnow in the south. This triple pincers
movement was perfectly successful. The Polish army as a whole never
got a chance to fight. By September 8, German forces had reached the
outskirts of Warsaw; by September 12, they had wiped up Poland —
except for Warsaw which was isolated — ^west of the Vistula They
continued to advance and clean up what resistance remained. Warsaw
held out bravely and hopelessly, and capitulated on September 27.
In a month, the war was over.

Why did not the British and French help the Poles? Certainly the
Poles, in those terrible first days, anticipated prompt assistance — ^as
the British pledge called for — and felt very badly let down. According
to the British Blue Book, Colonel Beck, the Polish foreign minister,
was hoping for British ‘'action of a military character to relieve the
pressure” on Poland as early as September i, the first day of the war.
The British ambassador in Warsaw telegraphed Lord Halifax ot
September 2, ‘T trust I may be informed at the earliest possible mo-
ment of our declaration of war and that our air force will make every
effort to show activity on the western front with a view to relieving
pressure here.”

The ambassador’s hopes were dashed by events. To say nothing ol
Polish hopes. But it was impossible from any practical point of view
for either the British or French to send direct help to Poland. There
was no way to get troops there. Nor could they send aircraft to Poland
in any considerable number. We know now that the Germans used at
least 90 per cent of their first line planes in the Polish campaign. But
no one knew this then. The British, in those first furious and uncer-
tain days, had no guarantee that the Germans might not make a ter-
rific assault on Paris and London. They had to keep every plane at
home. Nor was a frontal attack on the Siegfried line possible. All
the British could do was say to the Poles, in effect, “Wait. Your only
hope of resurrection is that we win the war in the west. If we risk
anything to help you now, we may both lose. Wait. Your time will come.”

Great Britain meantime had declared that a state of war existed
with Germany as from 1 1 :oo A M., Sunday, September 3. The Saturday
had passed in final desperate maneuvers to save the peace. When, on
September 2, Chamberlain postponed the declaration of war, he came
near to being shouted down in the House of Commons. The French

xviii INTRODUCTION

followed the British declaration of war on Sunday, September 3, at
5 ;oo P.M. Both countries immediately set about the fullest cooperation
and coordination. Events took place almost at once that had taken
years to achieve in the first world war. The principle of a unified com-
mand had already been accepted; a Supreme War Council comprising
both French and British began to function. By September 12 — an aston-
ishingly quick performance — British troops were landing in France.

The major attention of the British was, however, devoted to air and
sea. On September 4 occurred the first big air raid of the war in the
west, a British attack on the German fleet at Wilhelmshaven. On the
following nights the British sent planes over Germany dropping
millions upon millions of propaganda leaflets. Churchill became First
Lord of the Admiralty on September 4, and a Ministry of Economic
Warfare was set up, with the veteran treasury official Sir Frederick
Leith-Ross as director general. This ministry was in essence a ministry
of blockade. It became clear that the major British strategy would be
what it turned out to be in the last war, an attempt to starve Germany
out. To this blockade the Germans responded with counter-blockade.
The British sank or interned German ships, and set up a severe con-
traband control. The German U-boats sought to torpedo and sink
British merchantmen. As early as September 29, the British had the
convoy system in full operation. This checked the U-boats.

During the first weeks of the war almost everyone expected a
French offensive on the Western Front. But — for reasons I have
^adduced — ^it did not materialize. General Gamelin began a process of
infinitely slow and careful nibbling. He sent scouting parties to mop
up the No Man^s Land between the two great western walls. By
September 9 most of the Warndt forest fell to the French. But the
advance, severely limited in objectives, was severely cautious in pro-
cedure. By the end of September the French stood on a thin line of
German territory along the whole Rhine-Moselle front, without how-
ever attempting to penetrate the Siegfried line proper. When Polish
resistance collapsed, the French withdrew. Stalemate then set in. It
lasted months, almost without activity. Each side sat deep in concrete,
kept warm, and waited. There were very few casualties. Probably from
September to December 15 fewer men were killed and wounded on
the western front than perished in a single minute’s advance in the
great offensives of 1914-18.

Meantime extraordinary events were taking place in the east. Russia

INTRODUCTION

XIX

watched the Polish campaign warily. On September 14, when it was
already clear that the Poles could not survive, an ominous press cam-
paign against Poland began in the Russian press.^ On Sunday, Sep-
tember 17, a Sunday never to be forgotten by journalists in London,
Russian troops invaded Poland along the whole length of the frontier.
This was a staggering event. It seemed to reverse the whole process
of Soviet history. Everywhere people had been disillusioned by the
Russo-German pact of August 24. Now came this sequel. The Soviet
Union, which had for so many years declaimed against aggression, be-
came an aggressor itself. The Russian invasion of Poland was a severe
blow to friends of the U.S.S.R.; it was a severer blow to Poland. It
was the coup de grace. The Poles, trapped between two enemies, could
not possibly continue fighting. On September 17 the Polish govern-
ment fled. Rydz-Smigly and Beck were interned in Rumania. They
ought, one might say, to have been interned somewhere else before.

The Russians encountered very little resistance and reached Vilna
on September 18 and Lwow on the 20th. Then Russian and German
armed forces met for the first time, and greeted one another, in of all
places Brest-Litovsk, where twenty-one years before they had signed
a pregnant peace. The two dictator states then carved Poland between
them. The fourth partition of Poland took place, and Poland as an
independent state disappeared. Provisionally the new Russo-German
frontier was drawn through Warsaw. The knife went through the
unhappy country’s heart. Subsequently the Russians agreed to recede
to the line Grajev-Brest Litovsk-Przemysl, roughly equivalent to the
Curzon line of 1919. They retained White Russia and a substantial
share of the Ukraine. On September 29 came a second Russo-German
friendship treaty, which delimited and confirmed the new frontiers.

But the Russians had by no means finished their adventures. On the
same day, September 29, the Soviets concluded a “Pact of Mutual
Assistance” with the small Baltic state Estonia. The Estonian foreign
minister had been summoned to Moscow ; he could not resist the Soviet
demands placed before him. Similar treaties, following similar diplo-
matic pressure, came very promptly with Latvia (October 5), and
Lithuania (October 10). The treaties were cut to the same pattern.
They gave the U.S.S.R. the right to establish naval and aerial bases

2 It is sometimes forgotten that, significantly, the Russians concluded an armistice
with Japan on September 16. This released them from any preoccupation with the
Far East, and provisionally gave them a free hand in the west.

INTRODUCTION

in each country, and to maintain garrisons there. Presently Red Army
troops marched into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, about 30,000 in
each country. The Baltic became, m part, a Russian lake. Stalin ex-
tended the power if not the actual territory of the Soviet Union to
the old Tsarist frontier. These events staggered the western world.
The great unknown quantity was the position of Germany, and the
degree of association between Hitler and Stalin. Their cooperation
in regard to Poland was manifest. But whether Hitler approved of
Soviet penetration into the Baltic is far from certain. At once Hitler
summoned Baltic Germans back to Germany. An unprecedented forced
migration took place of thousands of German families, some of whom
had lived in the Baltic area for centuries.

Soon after the Latvian pact, and before the Lithuanian pact was
concluded, the Russian government opened negotiations with Finland.
Their eyes turned north. Finland alone of the Baltic states remained
outside their new sphere of influence. The Russians were more polite
to the Finns — at first — ^than to the other Balts. The negotiations were
protracted. They began on October 7, and broke off on November 15
with the return of the Finnish delegation to Helsingfors. The Finns
refused to accede to the Russian demands. What the Russians wanted
was, so far as we know now, certain islands and headlands in the
Gulf of Finland for use as naval bases, as well as a territorial rectifica-
tion in the extreme north. The Finns would not give this territory up.
A few days of uneasy tension followed. Then — ^again ominously! —
came the familiar press campaign, then mass meetings in Russia against
the Finns, and finally that well-known diplomatic cure-all, a frontier
^'incident.*' It was as clumsy and obviously fabricated as all such
‘'incidents'' have been since Mukden in 1931. On November 30, 1939,
the Russian invasion of Finland began.

Seldom has a more callous and brutal attempt to browbeat and club
a nation into submission taken place. But to the astonishment of
everyone the Finns, with a total population of 3,667,067, with only
insignificant and outdated equipment, isolated from outside help, fought
back. They attempted to repel the giant Russian invader, with his
170,000,000 people, his army of not less than 15,000,000 men. The war
opened with an aerial bombardment of Helsingfors. The Russians
then attacked with tanks and infantry on three fronts : in the extreme
north, near the Finnish nickel mines, where they sought to cut Finland
from the sea and establish a common frontier with Norway; in the

INTRODUCTION xxi

middle, where they hoped to cut the 'Vaist of Finland’’ and reach
the Gulf of Bothnia, which would bring them very close indeed to
Sweden ; and m the south, on the Karelian Isthmus, between Leningrad
and Helsingfors. On all three fronts, Finnish resistance was stubborn.
Late in December the war was still being bitterly fought.

Meantime events in the west were largely confined to diplomacy,
propaganda, the air, and the sea. On October 6 Hitler made his most
important speech of the war to date, in which he summarized the
results of the Polish campaign, and outlined— not too specifically— his
conditions for peace. This was the culmination of the so-called ‘‘peace
offensive. The British replied that they could accept no peace pro-
posals which did not “effectively free Europe from the menace of
3'g^i’GSSion,” that Hitler had “open aspirations for world domination,”
and that no trust could be put in his word.

Early in November it seemed that the Germans, to break the dead-
lock in the west, might attempt a flank movement on the 1914 pattern
and invade France through Holland and Belgium. Fear of invasion
was particularly acute m Holland On November 7 came a joint peace
offer by the Netherlands Queen and the Belgian King. It was rejected.
But because the Belgians associated themselves with the declaration
and emphasized their “solidarity” with the Netherlands, it may have
saved Holland from war. To attack Holland, and thus get precious
air bases for the campaign against England, was one thing for the
German general staff to consider. But to attack Belgium too, if the
Belgians gave permission for British and French troops to enter their
territory, was quite something else again.

During October and November air raids in the west were incessant
but seldom successful. The Germans on several occasions reached the
Firth of Forth and Scapa Flow, but their bombers did comparatively
little damage. On October 25 British reconnaissance planes flew over
Berlin for the first time. In mid-December British squadrons reached
Wilhelmshaven, and the fiercest air battle of the war was reported,
with several score of planes engaged.

At sea the British were almost completely successful in maintaining
their communications and keeping the Germans locked up. Sea power
was the great British contribution. On September 18, however, the
aircraft carrier Courageous was sunk, and on October 14 — ^the single
most extraordinary feat of the war so far — a German submarine man-
aged to penetrate Scapa Flow, and torpedo the battleship Royal Oak.

XXll

INTRODUCTION

On November 26 the converted cruiser Rawalpindi was sunk in a naval
engagement near Iceland by one of the German pocket battleships that
still roamed the Atlantic. Meantime, by dropping magnetic mines from
the air, the Germans destroyed considerable amounts of British and
neutral shipping on the east coast of England. On December 17 the
pocket battleship Graf Spee was caught by three smaller British ships
near Montevideo, and forced into harbor after a brilliant action. Rather
than endure internment or risk destruction, the Graf Spee killed itself.
A few days later its captain committed suicide. Then on December 20
the luxury liner Columbus, rather than submit to capture, did likewise.

By mid-December the Germans claimed that they had destroyed
more than 800,000 tons of British and allied shipping. On the other
hand, the British blockade was becoming more efficacious and damaging
to the Germans day by day.

The position of the neutral states remained of the greatest possible
importance during the early months of the war. Almost the most in-
teresting thing about the struggle was the number of countries not
in it. Belgium, Holland, Spain, Hungary, Rumania, and the Balkan
and Scandinavian states maintained a precarious neutrality. On Oc-
tober 19 came a vitally important treaty between Britain, France, and
Turkey, binding the three states to cooperation and mutual defense.
This seemed to assure Turkish benevolence to the allies, though the
Turks are not obliged to take action against Soviet Russia. As to Italy,
Mussolini very carefully set about and maintained a policy of ‘‘non-
belligerence.”

What kept the neutral states neutral was, of course, self-interest
and the desire for self-preservation. Everybody wanted to dig in and
avoid the storm.

INSIDE EUROPE

Chapter I

Hitler

The union of theorizer, organizer, and leader in one man
is the rarest phenomenon on earth; therein lies greatness,

— ^Adolf Hitler

A dolf hitler, irrational, contradictory, complex, is an unpredict-
^ able character; therein he his power and his menace. To millions
of honest Germans he is sublime, a figure of adoration; he fills them
with love, fear, and nationalist ecstasy. To many other Germans he is
meager and ridiculous — a charlatan, a lucky hysteric, and a lying dema-
gogue. What are the reasons for this paradox? What are the sources
of his extraordinary power ?

This paunchy, Charlie-Chaplin-mustached man, given to insomnia and
emotionalism, who is the head of the Nazi party, commander-in-chief
of the German army and navy. Leader of the German nation, creator,
President, and chancellor of the Third Reich, was born in Austria in
1889 He was not a German by birth. This was a highly important
point inflaming his early nationalism. He developed the implacable pa-
triotism of the frontiersman, the exile. Only an Austrian could take
Germanism so seriously.

The inside story of Hitler includes many extraordinary and bizarre
episodes. Before discussing his birth and childhood and outlining his
career, it may be well to present a broad detailed picture of his character
and his daily routine and his attitudes and habits, his personal char-*
acteristics and limitations.

Hitler the Human Being

His imagination is purely political. I have seen his early paintings,
those which he submitted to the Vienna art academy as a boy. They
are prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling, or spiritual imagi-
nation. They are architect's sketches : painful and precise draftsmanship ;
nothing more. No wonder the Vienna professors told him to go to an
architectural school and give up pure art as hopeless. Yet he still wants

INSIDE EUROPE

deeply to be an artist. In 1939, during the crisis leading to the Polish
war, he told Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador, that his
only ambition was to retire to the Berchtesgaden hills and paint.

He went only to elementary school, and by no stretch of generosity
could he be called a person of genuine culture. He is not nearly so
cultivated, as sophisticatedly interested in intellectual affairs as is, say,
Mussolini. He reads almost nothing. The Treaty of Versailles was, prob-
ably, the most concrete single influence on his life ; but it is doubtful if
he ever read it in full. He dislikes intellectuals. He has never been out-
side Germany since his youth in Austria (if you except his War expe-
riences in Flanders and two brief visits to Mussolini) and he speaks
no foreign language, except a few words of French.

To many who meet him. Hitler seems awkward and ill at ease. This
is because visitors, even among his subordinates, obtrude personal reali-
ties which interfere with his incessant fantasies. He has no poise. He
finds it difficult to make quick decisions: capacity for quick decisions
derives from inner harmony, which he lacks. He is no “strong, silent
man.”

Foreigners, especially interviewers from British or American papers,
may find him cordial and even candid but they seldom have opportunity
to question him, to participate in a give-and-take discussion. Hitler rants.
He orates. He is extremely emotional.^ He seldom answers questions. He
talks to you as if you were a public meeting, and nothing can stop the
gush of words.

Years ago, before signing his short-lived friendship pact with Poland,
he received a well-known American publicist and editor. He did ask a
question: What the American would think if, for example, Mexico
were Poland and Texas were cut off from the United States by a
“corridor” in Mexico. The American replied, “The answer to that is
that Canada is not France.” Hitler had intended the question rhetori-
cally, and he was so shocked and upset by the little interruption that
it took him some time to get in full voice again — on another point.

For a time it was said commonly that Hitler’s best trait was loyalty.
He would never, the sardonic joke put it, give up three things: the
Jews, his friends, and Austria, Nobody would make that joke to-day,
now that Captain Roehm is dead. Nor would anyone of knowledge and

^ He told one astonished group of interviewers that they cOtlld “crucify” him If
he did not keep his promises.

HITLER 3

disrertment have made it even before June 30, 1934, because the scroll
ot riltler s disloyalties was written in giant words.

One after another he eUminated those who helped him to his career:
Drexler, Feder, Gregor Strasser. It is true that he has been loyal to
some collea^es— those who never disagreed with him, who gave him ab-
solute obedience. This loyalty is not an unmixed virtue, considering the
imsavoriness of such men as Streicher, the Nuremberg Jew-baiter. Noth-
ing can persuade Hitler to give up Streicher and some other comrades.
Unsavoriness alone is not enough to provoke his Draconian ingratitude.

His physical courage is doubtful. When his men were fired on in the
Munich Putsch of 1923, he flung himself to the street with such vio-
lence that his shoulder was broken. Nazi explanations of this are two:
(1) linked arm in arm with a man on his right who was shot and killed,
he was jerked unwittingly to the pavement; (2) he behaved with the
reflex action of the veteran front-line soldier, viz., sensibly fell flat when
the bullets came.

Hitler has told an acquaintance his own story of the somewhat mys-
terious circumstances in which he won the Iron Cross. He was a dispatch-
bearer. He was carrying messages across a part of No-Man's-Land
which was believed to be clear of enemy troops, when he heard French
voices. He was alone, armed only with a revolver ; so with great presence
of mind he shouted imaginary orders to an imaginary column of men.
The Frenchmen tumbled out of a deserted dugout, seven in all, hands
up. Hitler alone delivered all seven to the German lines. Recounting
this story privately, he told his interlocutor that he knew the feat would
have been impossible, had the seven men been American or English
instead of French.^

Like that of all fanatics, his capacity for self-belief, his ability to
delude himself, is enormous. Thus he is quite ^'sincere'' — ^he really
believes it — ^when in a preposterous interview with the Daily Mail he
says that the Nazi revolution cost only twenty-six lives. He believes
absolutely in what he says — at the moment.

But his lies have been notorious Heiden^ mentions some of the more
recondite untruths, and others are known to every student. Hitler
promised the authorities of Bavaria not to make a Putsch ; and promptly

^ This story is not the official version, which is more grandiloquent. Some
mystery attaches to the exact circumstances Cf. Heli, a bright anonymous British
book about Germany, p. 9.

® History of National Socialism, by Konrad Heiden. a book indispensable for the
study of the new Germany

INSIDE EUROPE

made one. He promised to tolerate the Papen government ; then fought
it. He promised not to change the composition of his first cabinet ; then
changed it. He promised to kill himself if the Munich coup failed; it
failed, and he is still alive.

The Man Without Habits

Hitler, nearing fifty-one, is not in first-rate physical condition. He has
gained about twelve pounds in the past few years, and his neck and
midriff show it. His physical presence has always been indifferent ; the
sloppiness with which he salutes is, for instance, notorious. The fore-
arm barely moves above the elbow. He had lung trouble as a boy, and
was blinded by poison gas in the War.

In August, 193s, it was suddenly revealed that the Leader had suf-
fered a minor operation some months before to remove a polyp on his
vocal cords — penalty of years of tub-thumping. The operation was suc-
cessful. The next month Hitler shocked his adherents at Nuremberg by
alluding, in emotional and circumlocutory terms, to the possibility of
his death. 'T do not know when I shall finally close my eyes,’^ he said,
''but I do know that the party will continue and will rule. Leaders will
come and Leaders will die, but Germany will live. . . . The army must
preserve the power given to Germany and watch over it.^’ The speech
led to rumors (quite unconfirmed) that the growth in Hitler's throat was
malignant, and that he had cancer.

Nowadays Hitler broods and talks about death a good deal. One
reason for his prodigious expansionist efforts in 1938 and 1939 was
fear of death before his work was complete.

He takes no exercise, and his only important relaxation — ^though
lately he began to like battleship cruises in the Baltic or North Sea —
is music. He is deeply musical. Wagner is one of the cardinal influences
on his life; he is obsessed by Wagner. He goes to opera as often as he
can, and he was attending the Bayreuth Festival when, on July 25,
1934, Nazi putschists murdered Chancellor Dollfuss of Austria. Sessions
of the Reichstag, which take place in the Kroll Opera House, sometimes
end with whole performances of Wagner operas — ^to the boredom of
non-musical deputies !

When fatigued at night in the old days, his friend and court jester
Hanf staengl was sometimes summoned to play him to sleep, occasionally
with Schumann or Verdi, more often with Beethoven and Wagner, for
Hitler needs music like dope. Hanfstaengl is a demoniac pianist. I have

HITLER

heard him thump the keys at the Kaiserhof with such resonance that
the walls shook. When Hanfstaengl plays, he keeps time to his own
music by puffing out his cheeks and bellowing like a trumpet. The effect
is amazing. You cannot but believe that a trumpeter is hidden somewhere
in the room.

Hitler cares nothing for books ; nothing for clothes (he seldom wears
anything but an ordinary brown-shirt uniform, or a double-breasted
blue serge suit, with the inevitable raincoat and slouch hat) ; very little
for friends; and nothing for food and drink. He neither smokes nor
drinks, and he will not allow anyone to smoke near him. He is prac-
tically a vegetarian. At the banquet tendered him by Mussolini he would
eat only a double portion of scrambled eggs. He drinks coffee occasion-
ally, but not often. Once or twice a week he crosses from the Chancellery
to the Kaiserhof Hotel (the G.H.Q. of the Nazi party before he came
to power), and sits there and sips — chocolate.

This has led many people to speak of Hitler's ^'asceticism” but as-
ceticism is not quite the proper word. He is limited in sesthetic interests,
but he IS no flagellant or anchorite. There is very little of the austere
in Hitler. He eats only vegetables — ^but they are prepared by an ex>^
quisitely competent chef He lives "simply” — ^but his house in Berchtes-
gaden is the last word in modern sumptuousness.

He works, when in Berlin, in the palace of the Reichskanzler on the
Wilhelmstrasse. He seldom uses the president's palace a hundred yards
away on the same street, because when Hindenburg died he wanted to
eliminate as much as possible the memory of Presidential Germany.
The building is new, furnished in modern glass and metal, and Hitler
helped design it. Murals of the life of Wotan adorn the walls. An im-
provised balcony has been built over the street, from which, on public
occasions, the Leader may review his men. Beneath the hall — according
to reports — ^is a comfortable bomb-proof cellar.

Hitler dislikes Berlin. He leaves the capital at any opportunity, pre-
ferring Munich or Berchtesgaden, a village in southern Bavaria, where
he has an alpine establishment, Haus Wachenfeld. Perched on the side of
a mountain, this retreat, dear to his heart, is not far from the former
Austrian frontier, a psychological fact of great significance. From his
front porch he could almost see the homeland which repudiated him,
and for which he yearned for many years.

Above the Berchtesgaden house — ^where he came in 1938 and 1939 to
spend more and more time, often neglecting Berlin for weeks on end—

INSIDE EUROPE

is an amazing lookout or aerie his engineers have built on a mountain
top, near Kehlstein. A special, heavily guarded, looping road leads
to bronze gates cut into a sheer wall of rock; inside the solid moun-
tain, an elevator shaft rises four hundred feet. Here, on top, is a large
circular room walled with windows. And here, when he really wants
to be alone, Hitler comes.

Another peculiar point about Hitler is his passionate interest in
astrology. It is widely believed that he set the date for the Sudeten
crisis by advice of astrologers.

Friends

By a man’s friends may ye know him. But Hitler has very few.

For years his most intimate associate, beyond all doubt, was Capt.
Ernst Roehm, chief of staff of the SA (Sturm Ahteilung — storm troops
— Brown Shirts), who was executed in June 30, 1934. From one of the
half dozen men in Germany indisputably most qualified to know, I have
heard it that Roehm was the only man in Germany, the single German
out of 65,000,000 Germans, with whom Hitler was on Du-Fuss (thee
and thou) terms. Now that Roehm is dead, there is no single German
who calls Hitler ‘‘Adolf.” Roehm was a notorious homosexual, but one
should not deduce from this that Hitler is homosexual also.

The man who is probably closest to Hitler since Roehm’s death is
his chief bodyguard, Lieut. Bruckner. Another close associate is Max
Amman, who was his top sergeant in the Great War. For a time his
former captain, Fritz Weidemann, now German consul-general in San
Francisco, was also close. Politically his most intimate adviser is cer-
tainly the foreign minister, Herr von Ribbentrop, who is one of the
very few people who can see him at any time, without previous arrange-
ment. He is bewitched by Ribbentrop’s “wisdom.” His chief permanent
officials, like Dietrich, his Press secretary, may see him daily, and so
may Hess, the deputy leader of the party; but even Hess is not an
intimate friend. Neither Goering nor Goebbels may, as a rule, see
Hitler without appointment.

He is almost oblivious of ordinary personal contacts. A colleague of
mine traveled with him, in the same airplane, day after day, for two
months during the 1932 electoral campaigns. Hitler never talked to a
soul, not even to his secretaries, in the long hours in the air; never
stirred ; never smiled. My friend remembers most vividly that, in order
to sneak a cigarette when the nlane stoooed. he had to run out of sis^ht

HITLER

of the entourage. He says that he saw Hitler a steady five or six hours
a day during his trip, but that he is perfectly sure Hitler, meeting him
by chance outside the airplane, would not have known his name or face.

He damns profession of emotion to the bursting point, then is apt to
break out in crying fits. A torrent of feminine tears compensates for the
months of uneasy struggle not to give himself away. For instance, when
he spent a whole night trying to persuade a dissident leader, Otto
Strasser, from leaving the party, he broke into tears three times. In the
early days he often wept, when other methods to carry a point failed.^

Hitler does not enjoy too great exposure of this weakness, and he
tends to keep all subordinates at a distance. They worship him : but they
do not know him well. They may see him every day, year in year out;
but they would never dare to be familiar. Hanfstaengl told me once that
in all the years of their association he had never called Hitler anything
except ''Herr Hitler'" or "Herr Reichskanzler'" after the Leader reached
power; and that Hitler had never called him by first name or his
diminutive (Putzi), but always "Hanfstaengl"" or "Dr. Hanfstaengl.""
There is an inhumanity about the inner circle of the Nazi party that is
scarcely credible.

An old-time party member, to-day, would address Hitler as "Mein
Fiihrer"" ; others as "Herr Reichskanzler."" When greeted with the Nazi
salute and the words "Heil Hitler,"" Hitler himself replies with "Heil
Hitler."" Speechmaking, the Leader addresses his followers as "My""
German people. In posters for the plebiscites he asks, "Dost thou, Ger-
man man, and thou, German woman — etc.’" It is as if he feels closer to
the German people in bulk than to any individual German, and this is
indeed true. The German people are the chief emotional reality of his
life.

Let us, now, examine Hitler’s relation to the imperatives which domi-
nate the lives of most men.

Attitude Toward Women

He is totally uninterested in women from any personal sexual point
of view. He thinks of them as housewives and mothers or potential
mothers, to provide sons for the battlefield — other people’s sons.

"The life of our people must be freed from the asphyxiating perfume

^ Compare with Stalin, for instance. Can one imagine Stalin bawling after a hard
day, or summoning a comrade to play him music ?

INSIDE EUROPE

of modern eroticism/’ he says in Mein Kampf, his autobiography.® His
personal life embodies this precept to the fullest. He is not a woman-
hater, but he avoids and evades women. His manners are those of the
wary chevalier, given to hand-kissing — and nothing else. Many women
are attracted to him sexually, but they have had to give up the chase.
Frau Goebbels formerly had evening parties to which she asked pretty
and distinguished women to meet him, but she was never able to arrange
a match.® Occasional rumors of the engagement of the coy Leader to
various ladies are nonsense. It is quite possible that Hitler has never had
anything to do with a woman in his life.

Occasionally young English or American girls, ardent Aryans, come to
see him, and sometimes they are received, like Miss Unity Mitford. But
Hitler does little but harangue them. At the top of his voice he screeches
politics, and after a time subsides, limp and exhausted. Even these occa-
sions are not tete-a-tete. For Hitler is very fond of the little daughter of
Dr. Goebbels, and, fantastic as it may seem, she is often in the room,
sometimes on the Leader’s knee.

Nor, as is so widely believed, is he homosexual. Several German jour-
nalists spent much time and energy, when such an investigation was
possible, checking every lodging that Hitler, in Munich days, had slept
in; they interviewed beer-hall proprietors, coffee-house waiters, land-
ladies, porters. No evidence was discovered that Hitler had been in-
timate with anybody of any sex at any time. His sexual energies, at the
beginning of his career, were obviously sublimated into oratory. The
influence of his mother and childhood environment, which we shall
examine in Chapter II, contributed signally to his frustration. Most of
those German writers and observers best equipped to know think that
Hitler is a virgin.

Attitude Toward Money

Hitler has no use for money personally and therefore very little in-
terest in it, except for political purposes. He has virtually no financial
sophistication; his lack of knowledge of even the practical details of
finance, as of economics, is profound.

Nowadays what would he need money for ^ The state furnishes him
with servants, residences, motor-cars. One of his last personal purchases

® Most of my quotations from Mein Kampf are from the English edition. (Hurst
& Blackett, Ltd., 1933 )

® Frau Goebbels herself, before she married the propaganda minister, had designs
on Hitler, it is said, but she gave up early.

HITLER

was a new raincoat for the visit to Mussolini in June, 1934. Incidentally,
members of his staff got into trouble over this, because on their advice
he carried only civilian clothes ; when he stepped from his airplane and
saw Mussolini and all the Italians in uniform, he was ashamed of his
mufti nakedness; and even suspected his advisers of purposely embar-
rassing him*

Hitler takes no salary from the state ; rather he donates it to a fund
which supports workmen who have suffered from labor accidents ; but
his private fortune could be considerable, if he chose to save. He an-
nounced late in 1935 that he — alone among statesmen — ^had no bank
account or stocks or shares. Previous to this, it had been thought that
he was part-owner of Franz Eher & Co., Munich, the publishers of the
chief Nazi organs, Volkischer Beobachter, Angriff, etc., one of the big-
gest publishing houses in Europe* Its director, Max Amman, Hitler’s
former sergeant, was for many years his business manager.

If Hitler has no personal fortune, he must have turned all his earn-
ings from his autobiography, Mein Kampf, to the party. This book is
obligatory reading for Germans and, at a high price (RM 7.20 or about
$3.00), it has sold 5,200,000 copies since its publication m 1925, now
being in its 494th edition. If his royalty is fifteen per cent, a moderate
estimate, Hitler’s total proceeds from this source at the end of 1939
should have been at least $3,000,000.

Nothing is more difficult in Europe than discovering the facts of the
private fortunes of leading men. It is sacrosanct and thus forbidden
ground to questioners in all countries. . . . Does any dictator. Hitler
or Mussolini or Stalin, carry cash in his pocket, or make actual pur-
chases in cash? It is unlikely.

Attitude Toward Religion

Hitler was born and brought up a Roman Catholic. But he lost faith
early and he attends no religious services of any kind. His Catholicism
means nothing to him ; he is impervious even to the solace of confession.
On being formed his government almost immediately began a fierce
religious war against Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike.

Why? Perhaps the reason was not religion fundamentally, but poli-
tics. To Hitler the overwhelming first business of the Nazi revolution
was the '"unification,” the Gleichschaltung (coordination) of Germany.
He had one driving passion, the removal from the Reich of any competi-

INSIDE EUROPE

tion, of whatever kind. The Vatican, like Judaism, was a profoundly
international (thus non-German) organism. Therefore — out with it.

The basis of much of the early domestic madness of Hitlerism was his
incredibly severe and drastic desire to purge Germany of non-German
elements, to create a hundred per cent Germany for one hundred per
cent Germans only. He disliked bankers and department stores — ^as
Dorothy Thompson pointed out — ^because they represented non-German,
international, financial and commercial forces. He detested socialists and
communists because they were affiliated with world groups aiming to
internationalize labor. He loathed, above all, pacifists, because pacifists,
opposing war, were internationalists.

Catholicism he considered a particularly dangerous competitive force,
because it demands two allegiances of a man, and double allegiance was
something Hitler could not countenance. Thus the campaign against the
“black moles,” as Nazis call priests. Several times German relations with
the Vatican have neared the breaking point. Protestantism was — ^theo-
retically — a simpler matter to deal with, because the Lutheran Church
presumably was German and nationalist. Hitler thought that by the
simple installation of an army chaplain, a ferocious Nazi named Mueller,
as Reichsbishop, he could “coordinate” the Evangelical Church in Ger-
many, and turn it to his service. The idea of a united Protestant Church
appealed to his neat architect’s mind. He was wrong. The church ques-
tion has been an itching pot of trouble ever since. All through 1937
and 1938 it raged.

It was quite natural, following the confused failure to Nazify Prot-
estantism, that some of Hitler’s followers should have turned to Pagan-
ism. The Norse myths are a first-class nationalist substitute. Carried
to its logical extreme Naziism in fact demands the creation of a new
and nationalist religion. Hitler indicated this in a speech at Nurem-
berg in September, 1935. “Christianity,” he said, “succeeded for a time
in uniting the old Teutonic tribes, but the Reformation destroyed this
unity. Germany is now a united nation. National Socialism has succeeded
where Christianity failed.” And Heiden has quoted Hitler’s remark, “We
do not want any other God than Germany itself.” This is a vital point.
Germany is Hitler’s religion.*^

One of Hitler’s grudges against God is the fact that Jesus was a Jew.
He can’t forgive either Christians or Jews for this. And many Nazis deny

^ In 1937 a special prayer was chanted over all German radio stations calling
Hitler ‘‘God's revelation to the German people” and their “redeemer.”

HITLER

that Jesus was Jewish. Another grudge is nationalist in origin. The basis
of the Nazi revolution was the defeat of Germany in the War. Thus reli-
gion had to be Nazified because no God who permitted the French and
other “inferior’’ races to win the War could be a satisfactory God for
Germany.

Hitler’s attempt to unify religion in Germany may lead to one dan-
ger. He himself may become a god. And divinity entails difficulties.
Gods have to perform miracles.

Vividly in Mein Kampf Hitler tells the story of his first encounter
with a Jew. He was a boy of seventeen, alone in Vienna, and he had
never seen a Jew in his life. The Jew, a visitor from Poland or the
Ukraine, in native costume, outraged the tender susceptibilities of the
youthful Hitler.

“Can this creature be a Jew?” he asked himself. Then, bursting on
him, came a second question : “Can he possibly be a German?*

This early experience had a profound influence on him, forming the
emotional base of his perfervid anti-Semitism. He was provincially
mortified that any such creature could be one with himself, a sharer in
German nationality. Later he “rationalized” his fury on economic and
political grounds. Jews, he said, took jobs away from “Germans” ; Jews
controlled the Press of Berlin, the theater, the arts; there were too
many Jewish lawyers, doctors, professors, the Jews were a “pestilence,
worse than the Black Death.”

No one can properly conceive the basic depth and breadth of Hitler’s
anti-Semitism who has not carefully read Mein Kampf. This book was
written almost fifteen years ago. He has changed it as edition followed
edition, in minor particulars, but in all editions his anti- Jewish prejudice
remains implacable.

Long before he became chancellor. Hitler would not allow himself to
speak to a Jew even on the telephone. A publicist as well known as
Walter Lippmann, a statesman as eminent as Lord Reading, would not be
received at the Brown House. An interesting point arises. Has Hitler,
in maturity, actually ever been in the company of a Jew, ever once
talked to one ? Possibly not.

I My Brother's Keeper?'*

Extreme precautions are, naturally, taken to guard Hitler against
assassination. When he rides out in Berlin, he travels in a Mercedes-Benz
as big as a locomotive. Lieut. Bruckner, his chief aide, usually sits

INSIDE EUROPE

beside him. Other bodyguards follow in another car, or in several cars.
The principal chauffer is named Schaub, who was an early comrade.
SS men with rifles may stand on the running-boards. If the occasion is
ceremonial and large crowds are present, the route is lined with SS men
(black shirts) alternately facing inward and outward.

Bruckner is of great importance politically because he serves to block
Hitler off from normal contacts. The complaint frequently is heard that
Hitler is badly informed on even vital matters, because Bruckner so
isolates him from wide acquaintance ; even advisers with the best inten-
tions may have little chance of seeing him.

Not long ago Hitler broke his new rule against social affairs by visit-
ing informally a diplomat and his wife who had been useful to him in
earlier days. The diplomat talked to Hitler frankly and told him some
honest truths. Hitler was upset. Then, the story says, Bruckner de-
scended on the diplomat, warning him under no circumstances to dare
talk frankly to Hitler again.

For years there was no authentic evidence of any attempt on Hitler's
life. Rumors, however, dealt in several. On June 17, 1934, a fortnight
before the June 30 clean-up, shots are supposed to have been fired at
Hitler's car as he was returning from the burial in German soil of
Goering’s first wife. In the autumn of 1934 an SS bodyguard was al-
legedly shot in the finger in the Hotel Kaiserhof, by a bullet meant for
Hitler. In March, 1937, General Goering surprised listeners by a veiled
reference to possible dangers to Hitler and threats against a possible
assassin. Then in November, 1939 came the unsuccessful bomb attempt
in the Munich beer hall. Several people were killed; Hitler escaped by
eleven minutes.

Insurance rates on his life are quoted in London. A man with im-
portant business in Germany, which might be ruined by the terror and
revolution which would very likely follow Hitler's assassination, paid
$52.50 per month for each $1,000 of insurance against Hitler's death.®

Personal Sources of Power

Now we may proceed to summarize Hitler's very considerable positive
qualities.

First, consider his single-mindedness, his intent fixity of purpose.
His tactics may change ; his strategy may change ; his aim, never. His

® Cf. N ews Chronicle, London, May 21, 1935 The charge for similar insurance
against Mussolini’s assassination was $20 on $500 for three months.

HITLER

aim is to create a strong national Germany, with himself atop it. No
opportunistic device, no zigzag in polemics, is too great for him ; but the
aim, the goal, never varies.

Associated with his single-mindedness is the quality of stamina. All
dictators have stamina; all need it. Despite Hitler's flabbiness and lack
of vigorous gesture, his physical endurance is considerable. I know
interviewers who have talked to him on the eve of an election, after he
has made several speeches a day, all over Germany, week on end ; they
found him fresh and even calm. ^Whaa I have a mission to fulfill, I will
have the strength for it," he said.

Unlike most dictators, he has no great capacity for hard work, for
industry; he is not the sloghorse for punishment that, for instance,
Stalin is. He is not a good executive; his desk is usually high with
documents requiring his decision which he neglects. He hates to make
up his mind. His orders are often vague and contradictory.

Yet he gets a good deal of work done. “Industry" in a dictator or
head of a state means, as a rule, ability to read and listen. The major
part of the work of Hitler or Mussolini is perusal of reports and atten-
tion to the advice of experts and subordinates. Half their working time
they are receiving information. Therefore it is necessary for a dictator
(a) to choose men intelligently — ^many of Hitler's best men he inherited
from the old civil service, (^) to instill faith in himself in them. Hitler
has succeeded in this double task amply. And when his men fail him,
he murders them.

Hitler's political sense is highly developed and acute. His calculations
are shrewd and penetrating to the smallest detail. For instance, his first
three major acts in foreign policy, Germany's departure from the League
of Nations, the introduction of conscription, and the occupation of the
Rhineland, were all set for Saturday afternoon, to ease the shock to
opinion abroad. When he has something unpleasant to explain, the events
of June 30 for instance, he usually speaks well after eight P M., so that
foreign newspapers can carry only a hurried and perhaps garbled
account of his words.

He made good practical use of his anti-Semitism. The Jewish terror
was, indeed, an excellent campaign maneuver. The Nazis surged into
power in March, 1933, with an immense series of electoral pledges. They
promised to end unemployment, rescind the Versailles Treaty, regain
the Polish corridor, assimilate Austria, abolish department stores, social-
ize industry, eliminate interest on capital, give the people land. These

INSIDE EUROPE

aims were more easily talked about than achieved. One thing the Nazis
could do. One pledge they could redeem — ^beat the Jews.

Hitler bases most decisions on intuition. Twice, on supreme occasions,
it served him well. In the spring of 1932 his most powerful supporters,
chiefly Roehm, pressed him to make a Putsch, Hitler refused, feeling
absolute certainty that he could come to power in a legal manner. Again,
in the autumn of 1932, after the Nazis had lost heavily in the November
elections, a strong section of the party, led by Gregor Strasser, urged
him to admit defeat and enter a coalition government on disadvantageous
terms. Hitler, with consummate perspicacity, refused. And within three
months he reached power such as the maddest of his followers had not
dreamed of.

Another source of Hitler’s power is his impersonality, as Frances
Gunther has pointed out. His vanity is extreme, but in an odd way it is
not personal. He has no peacockery. Mussolini must have given auto-
graphed photographs to thousands of admirers since 1922. Those which
Hitler has bestowed on friends may be counted on the fingers of two
hands. His vanity is the more effective because it expresses itself in non-
personal terms. He is the vessel, the instrument, of the will of the
German people; or so he pretends. Thus his famous statement, after
the June 30 murders, that for twenty-four hours he had been the
supreme court of Germany.

Heiden says that Hitler’s power is based on intellect, and his intellect
on logic. This would seem a dubious interpretation because Hitler’s
mind is not ratiocinative in the least : he is a man of passion, of instinct,
not of reason. His ^‘intellect” is that of a chameleon who knows when to
change his color; his ‘logic” that of a panther who is hungry, and thus
seeks food. He himself has said proudly that he is a “Somnambulist” —
strange giveaway !

His brain is small and vulgar, limited, sly, narrow, suspicious. But
behind it is the lamp of passion, and this passion has such quality that it
is immediately discernible and recognizabk, like a diamond in the sand.
The range of his interests is so slight that any sort of stimulus provokes
the identical reflex: music, religion, economics, mean nothing to him
except exercise in German nationalism.

Anthony Eden, when he visited Berlin in the spring of 1935, and
talked with Hitler seven hours, was quoted as saying that he showed
“complete mastery” of foreign affairs. This is, of course, nonsense.
Hitler does not know one-tenth as much about foreign affairs as, say.

HITLER

H. R. Knickerbocker, or Vernon Bartlett, or Hamilton Fish Armstrong,
or Dorothy Thompson, or Mr. Eden himself. What Eden meant was that
Hitler showed unflagging mastery of his own view of foreign affairs.

Demosthenes in Brown Shirt

Then there is oratory. This is probably the chief external explanation
of Hitler's rise. He talked himself to power. The strange thing is that
Hitler is a bad speaker. He screeches; his mannerisms are awkward;
his voice breaks at every peroration; he never knows when to stop.
Goebbels is a far more subtle and accomplished orator. Yet Hitler,
whose magnetism across the table is almost nil, can arouse an audience,
especially a big audience, to frenzy.

He knows, of course, all the tricks. At one period he was accustomed
to mention at great length the things that ‘"We Germans" {wir) had,
or did not have, or wanted to do, or could not do. The word wir
drove into the audience with the rhythmic savagery of a pneumatic drill.
Then Hitler would pause dramatically. That, he would say, was the
whole trouble. In Germany the word wir had no meaning ; the country
was disunited ; there was no “we."

Recently Hitler told a French interviewer about an early oratorical
trick and triumph, eighteen years ago in a communist stronghold in
Bavaria. He was savagely heckled. “At any moment they might have
thrown me out of the window, especially when they produced a blind
War invalid who began to speak against all the things that are sacred to
me. Fortunately I had also been blind as the result of the War. So I said
to these people, T know what this man feels. I was even more bewildered
than he at one moment — ^but I have recovered my sight !' "

Hitler’s first followers were converts in the literal sense of the term.
They hit the sawdust trail. Hitler might have been Aimee Semple
McPherson or Billy Sunday. Men listened to him once and were his
for life — for instance, Goebbels, Bruckner, Goering, Hess.

^^Ruin Seise Thee, Ruthless King^^

Hitler never flinched from the use of terror, and terror played a
powerful role in the creation of the Nazi state. From the beginning he
encouraged terror. The only purely joyous passage in Mein Kampf is
the description of his first big mass meeting, in which the newly organ-
ized SA pummeled hecklers bloody. The function of the SA was rough-

house: first, rough-house with the aim of preserving “order’’ at public
meetings , second, rough-house on the streets, to frighten, terrorize and
murder communists.

He gave jobs, big jobs, to confessed and admitted terrorists like
Killinger and Heines. When a communist was murdered at Potempa, in
Silesia, in circumstances of peculiarly revolting brutality, Hitler an-
nounced publicly his spiritual unity with the murderers. When, in
August, 1932, he thought that Hindenburg might appoint him chancellor,
he asked for a three-day period during which the SA could run wild on
the streets, and thus revenge themselves upon their enemies.

And we shall see presently what happened on the 30th June, 1934. To
say nothing of what happened to the Jews in 1938 and 1939.

Fuhrer Prinzip

Hitler’s chief contribution to political theory was the Fuhrer Prinzip
(Leader Principle). This means, briefly, authority from the top down,
obedience from the bottom up, the reversal of the democratic theory of
government. It was, as Heiden points out, a remarkably successful inven-
tion, since almost anybody could join the movement, no matter with
what various aims, and yet feel spiritual cohesion through the personal-
ity of the leader. The Nazi movement gave wonderful play to diverse
instincts and desires.

Then again, Germans love to be ruled. “The most blissful state a
German can experience is that of being bossed,” a friend of mine put
it in Berlin. And Edgar Ansel Mowrer has recorded the shouts of Nazi
youngsters on the streets, “We spit at freedom.” A German feels un-
dressed unless he is in uniform. The Fuhrer Prinzip not only exploited
this feeling by transforming the passive character of German docility,
German obedience, into an active virtue; it gave expression also to the
bipolar nature of obedience: namely, that most men — even Germans —
associate with a desire to be governed a hidden will to govern. The
Fuhrer Prinzip created hundreds, thousands, of svh-Fuhrers, little
Hitlers, down to the lowest storm-troop leader. It combined dignified
submission with opportunity for leadership.

Mein Kampf, for all its impersonality, reveals over and over again
Hitler’s faith in “the man.” After race and nation, personality is his
main preoccupation. It is easy to see that the Fuhrer Prinzip is simply
a rationalization of his own ambition; the theory is announced on the

HITLER

implicit understanding that the *Wn” is Hitler himself. ''A majority/''
he says, "‘can never be a substitute for the Man.''

Another Hitlerite doctrine is, of course, that of race. But Hitler did
not invent the concept of Aryanism; he took it over from Gobineau and
Houston Chamberlain. Most — ^if not all — ^neutral anthropologists think
that Hitler's “racist doctrine" is nonsense. They do not believe that
“pure" races exist.

Opposition

Hitlerism in its first stages was the process of “unifying" Germany.
Yet the Nazis struck at Protestants, Catholics, Jews ; they mortally af-
fronted the working classes; they could not put any serious program
of economic amelioration into effect without offending the industrialists ;
they alienated, by brutality and terror, the republicans, democrats, social-
ists, communists.

Hitler has held three major plebiscites so far. One asked vindication
of Germany's departure from the League, and he received a 92.3 per
cent vote of confidence. The second sought acceptance of his com-
bination of chancellorship and presidency after the death of Hinden-
burg; the affirmative vote was 38,362,760 out of 43,529,710 ballots cast.
The third followed the Rhineland crisis in March, 1936; his vote was
no less than ninety-eight per cent. Of course none was a fair vote in the
Anglo-Saxon sense of the term. The plebiscite in the Saar gave him
ninety per cent but it probably would have been the same under any other
chancellor. The last general election in Danzig, where every effort
was made to bring out the vote and which was a better indication than
the Saar of public feeling on a straight for-or-against-Hitler issue,
brought him 139,043 votes out of 234,956 — ^good enough, but not the
two-thirds majority he hoped for.

The last reasonably fair German election, on March 5, 1933 — even
though it took place under the shadow of the Reichstag fire— gave Hit-
ler thirty-seven per cent. I believe in an election to-day he would better
this considerably. Even so, the total Marxist (communist-cwm-socialist)
vote in 1933 was 11,845,000. This number has probably receded, but
just the same there is still a large opposition submerged in Germany.
What has happened to these millions of hidden voters?

They are terrified. They are hounded by the police and by spies. They
vote Yes in plebiscites because they are frightened of their skins. Some

i8 INSIDE EUROPE

few of them have sought cover actually by joining the SA. Most simply
swallow their opinions, their feelings, their inward decency — ^and wait.
They are waiting for their Day. But are they an active political force?
No.

The reason is that revolution is a profoundly difficult matter in a
police state like Germany, Russia, or Fascist Italy. It is almost an
axiom these days that no revolution can succeed until the equipment in
arms and ammunition of the revolutionaries is equal or superior to that
of the government. And this margin of superiority is transcendently
difficult to achieve.

The Nazis, to their own disadvantage, discovered the essential neces-
sity of arms in the Austrian civil war of July, 1934. They neglected to
arm their Austrian adherents, out of carelessness or over-confidence;
they assumed that once the signal for the revolt was given the Austrian
army and police would mutiny and turn over their arms to the Nazis ;
this did not happen. The army and police of Dr. Dollfuss remained, by
and large, loyal. Therefore we had the spectacle of thousands upon thou-
sands of potentially revolutionary Nazis inhibited from any decisive or
direct action simply because they did not possess arms. This lesson is
cardinal. You cannot fight a machine-gun by saying ^'Boo’^ to it.

If the people riot, Hitler can simply shoot them down. He has the
Reichswehr (regular army) to do this, not merely the SA and SS.
The Reichswehr (the ranks are mostly peasant boys) might not shoot
at a rising in the agrarian districts, but the farmers are the most tracta-
ble people in Hitler’s Reich. An urban population would get short
shrift. But, one may say, no man, not even Hitler, could shoot down
tens of thousands of unarmed or roughly armed rebels. The answer
to this is that it is not necessary to shoot down tens of thousands, A
few hundreds will be enough.

What is more likely to happen than open rebellion is the slow pressure
upward of mass discontent, grumbling, and passive resistance, sabotage
caused by growing privation, until the morale of the government cracks,
and the government, panicky, does foolish things. Discontent may corro-
sively simmer to the top, disorganizing the headship of state, causing
new rivalries between sub-leaders, creating fissures between, say, Rib-
bentrop on the left and Goering on the right, so deep and so unbridgeable
that Hitler is powerless to compose the conflict. But there are no signs that
this is happening yet. The 1939 war, moreover, served to unify Ger-
many, at least provisionally.

HITLER

Succession to the Purple

If Hitler should die to-morrow his successor would certainly be
Goering, bitterly as he is disliked and feared by many members of the
party. The Leader might himself prefer Hess, his deputy, as successor,
but in the rough-and-tumble that might follow his death, Hess would
have small chance against such a doughty character as Goering. The
general is the logical choice. Therefore when the Polish campaign began
Hitler formally named Goering to the succession, with Hess as second
choice. After Hess, the Nazi party is to choose the “strongest” man.

Goering has force, color, ambition; he is a figure of great popular
appeal. The quality and quantity of his uniforms are highly attractive
to Germans; his marriage may produce a dynasty. What is more im-
portant, the army likes him because he stands for the same thing as it
stands for: a strong Germany. Moreover, in the SS and remnants of
SA, Goering has a considerable armed force behind him. Finally, he
has the courage to grab the job, if grabbing is necessary, which it prob-
ably won’t be.

Goebbels would be impossible as successor to Hitler ; he is the clever-
est of all the Nazis, but everybody hates him. Frick is important, but too
colorless ; Ribbentrop too limited ; Ley and Darre out of the running as
“radicals”; Schacht is of the greatest importance in economics and
finance, but impossible as a popular leader. In fact, the only alternative
to Goering would seem to be a straight-out Reichswehr ministry formed
by an army coup d'etat, such as the one Schleicher might have headed.
Or a dark horse.

Rumors, however, to the effect that Goering is now actively intrigu-
ing against Hitler are nonsense. There are many virtues that Goering
lacks, but loyalty is not among them — ^at least not yet. Besides, Hitler
could eliminate Goering to-day almost as easily as he eliminated Roehm.
Hitler is all-powerful. Real rivals do not exist. Goering, Goebbels, and
all the rest of them, as H. R. Knickerbocker once expressed it, are
no more than moons to Hitler’s sun. They shine— but only when the
sun shines on them.®

® Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, stated in October,
J939> that Goering told him, “When a decision has to be taken, none of us counts
more than the stones on which we are standing. It is the Fuhrer alone who decides.”

Chapter II

Psychopathology of Dictators

The German has not the slightest notion how a people must
he misled if the adherence of the masses is sought,

— ^Adolf Hitler

N ot only Hitler but several modern leaders were born in border-
zones or actually different countries from those they came to rule.
Mustapha Kamal Ataturk, though you would hardly have called him
a Greek, was born in Salonika, Greece; Pilsudski was Lithuanian
in origin; Schuschnigg, the former Austrian chancellor, was born
in Italy ; and Stalin, as everyone knows, is not a Russian at all, but a
Georgian.

I have visited Braunau, in Austria, and seen the house where Hitler
was born. The legend has grown of a rustic dwelling, the Teutonic
equivalent of our log-cabin, where, in stern but idyllically bucolic cir-
cumstances, the Leader first saw daylight. Of course this is inaccurate.
The house is a three-story structure on the main street of Braunau, and
for twenty years it has been a Gasthaus (saloon, village pub) owned by
a local worthy named Josef Pommer. Where a bronze tablet may one
day mark the Leader’s birthplace an enameled metal sign now says,
^‘Spekl beer on draught.”

The house to-day is painted bright ocher brown, the color of the
brown-shirt uniform. It was padlocked by the Austrian authorities
in July, 1933, because it was a natural focus for the local Nazis. Hitler’s
parents never owned it; they lived in furnished rooms rented from
the landlord. On the other hand, his father was not a poor man, and
the legend that Hitler all but starved as a boy is nonsense.

The whole region around Braunau is Hitler country. Dozens of peo-
ple who are still alive remember him as a young man. In the village of
Spital, near Weitra, I met his mother’s sister and two of his first
cousins; in Leonding, near Linz, I talked to his Vormund (godfather),
the son of his old schoolmaster (who had been one of his classmates),

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF DICTATORS

the proprietors of the pub where his father died, and — interesting old
woman! — ^the midwife who hauled his infant body from his mother’s
womb.

Family Tree

The Hitler family springs from a section of Austria known as the
Waldviertel, billowing Danube country near what is now the Czecho-
slovak frontier. The peasants living there are humble folk, blanched by
poverty and gnarled by work ; honest. God-fearing, illiterate, and heavily
inbred. Populations of whole villages are first and second cousins. They
live by tilling the soil, working in mills, or practicing some humble
trade like carpentry.

In the Waldviertel village Spital a man named Johann Georg Hiedler
was born in February, 1792. This was Adolf Hitler’s grandfather. He
was a wandering miller’s helper. By him, a woman named Maria Anna
Schicklgruber had a son, born in a near-by hamlet, Strones, in 1837.
Five years later the parents were married, but the son took his mother’s
name — Schicklgruber — ^and was not legally legitimized till he was forty
years old, in 1877. Then he became known as Alois Hitler — ^Adolf
Hitler’s father.

The change from '‘Hiedler” to "Hitler” is easily explained. The
peasants could scarcely read and write ; names were hardly ever written
down, except at birth and death. Hiedler’s father, in fact, called himself
"Hiittler,” according to the records I saw in the village church. And
Paula Hitler, Adolf’s sister, to this day signs herself "Hiedler.”

Alois Hitler, Adolf’s father, was a cobbler. He married three times.
His first wife, Anna Glasl-Horer, was born in the Waldviertel town
of Theresienfeld in 1823. This Anna, a moderately rich woman, treated
the young cobbler, then known as Schicklgruber, almost more like a
mother than as a wife; she sent him to school, then purchased him a
job in the Austrian civil service. She was fourteen years older than
he. Thanks to her, he became a solid citizen, and the education of his
son Adolf, born years later by another wife, was made possible.

Anna died in Braunau in 1883; Alois waited only six weeks to marry
again, this time to a woman named Franzika Matzelberger Their
marriage lasted only a year. She died in 1884* Only three months after
her death, Alois married once more, this time to Adolf’s mother, Klara
Poelzl, a distant cousin. This was on January 7, 1885. Four years later,

INSIDE EUROPE

in Braunau, on April 20, 1889, Adolf Hitler, creator of the Third Reich,
was born. His father was fifty-two at his birth, his mother twenty-nine.

Klara Poelzl, Adolf's mother, was a woman of enterprise and cour-
age. Her father was a peasant in the village of Spital, and her mother
was Johanna Huttler, a cousin of Alois Hitler's father. When Klara
was ten years old (in 1870), she got her first job — as maid in the home
of Alois Hitler's first wife, Anna Glasl-Horer. Here Alois first saw
the little girl, a distant relative, whom fifteen years later he was to
marry — ^his first wife's servant.

Presently Klara ran away to Vienna. This was an unprecedented
thing to do. Few other girls in the Waldviertel had shown such initiative.
No one knows the reason for her flight. I have asked her sister (who
died last year) about it. She had no explanation. Klara lived in Vienna
— ^her circumstances a complete mystery — for ten years. Then in 1885
she returned to her native village, Spital. She was a tall, nervous girl
now, not as strong as most of the peasant stock she came from. She
lived with her parents in a house adjacent to the one — I have seen
them both — ^wherein Alois was brooding over the loss of his two
wives. He remembered the girl who had been his first wife's servant —
and married her.

By the first wife, Anna, Alois had had two children. A son, Alois
Junior (Adolf's half-brother), became a waiter and subsequently the
proprietor of a Berlin restaurant. A daughter, Angela, went to Vienna
where she married a man named Raupel and earned a living as a cook
in — ^believe it or not — b . Jewish Students' Charity Hall in Vienna.
Some years ago Adolf brought her to Germany and installed her as
housekeeper in his Berchtesgaden villa. Frau Raupel had a daughter —
Hitler's niece — ^who some time ago commited suicide.^

Klara had two children besides Adolf. Paula, born in 1897, is unmar-
ried (another spinster in this neurotic family) and lives to-day in
Vienna, an anonymous and forgotten figure. The local Nazis tried to
make a heroine of her, but she was too retiring. Hitler apparently has
nothing to do with her. The third child, Edouard, died in infancy.

Alois, a customs inspector, and Klara, with the boy Adolf growing
up, lived in Braunau,^ an important frontier town, until 1896, when
Alois retired on pension. Then he moved to a village near Linz named

^ The legend is that she was madly, hopelessly in love with her uncle, Adolf.

* Interestingly enough two of the most famous clairvoyants of modem Europe
were bom in Braunau, Willi and Rudi Schneider,

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF DICTATORS 23

Leonding, bought a house, and lived in it with Klara and Adolf till
he died in 1903.

Father and Mother

I have seen the tombstone of Hitler pkre. It reads :

HIER RUHET IN GOTT HERR

ALOIS HITLER
K.K. Zollamts OberofRzial I.P.

und Hausbesitzer

Gest. 3. Janner 1903, in 65 Lebensjahre

Dessen Gattin Frau

KLARA HITLER
Gest. 21 Dez. 1907 i. 47 Lebj.

R.I.P.

As is common in Austria, a small photograph of the dead man is
attached to the stone. A skull big and round and hairless like a melon ;
small, sharp, wicked little eyes ; a pair of bicycle-handle mustaches, and
a heavy tyrant's chin. The mother's picture we saw later in a relative's
house. A tall woman, with a narrow, sensitive face and arching eyes
over sunken cheek-bones; her yellow braids now a gray mat at the
back of the neck; large, luminous eyes.

Young Adolf detested his father, loved his mother. This difficult
parental relationship, on which the villagers with whom I talked and
the surviving relatives agreed, was obviously a cardinal point in the
development of Hitler's character. He had an GEdipus complex as big
as a house.

Hitler phre was truculent and overbearing; he died over a bottle
of wine in a public-house, of a sudden stroke. The father thought
that Adolf was a weakling and a worthless idler and dreamer; he
called him ""moon-struck," and bullied and beat him. So young Hitler
identified himself with his mother in opposition to the father. His
jealousy of the father produced an extreme divergence in his character.
Old Hitler was a drunkard; young Hitler never touched alcohol. Old
Hitler married three times in quick succession ; young Hitler never had
any love life at all. Old Hitler was besotted with indulgence; young
Hitler feared it.

INSIDE EUROPE

Adolf loved his mother passionately. When he was about six she
developed cancer, and it took her almost ten years to die. From her he
got his impulse to ambition, his sense of historical mission, because she,
too, wanted him to be different from his father. The mother encouraged
him to be an artist. Throughout his life. Hitler has been subconsciously
proving to his mother, the only woman he has loved, his right to inde-
pendence, success, power.^

In Spital, a country hamlet about an hour^s journey from Leonding,
I met several surviving members of the family, among them Hitler's
aunt, Theresa Schmidt (Klara’s sister), a bouncing old woman, and
her two sons, Edward and Anton, Hitler’s first cousins. One of them,
Edward, is a congenital defective, a hunchback with an impediment in
his speech — z pitiable creature. They are miserably poor.

These folk are Hitler’s blood relatives. Their plaster huts seem a
million miles from the shining roofs of Wilhelmstrasse, where the
Leader rules. Hitler has never returned to visit the district since he left
it as a boy. He sends these cousins no letters, no money, and seems
totally unaware of their existence.

Authority Complex

All dictators are abnormal. This may be accepted as an axiom. No
man perfectly normal can take it upon himself to rule a nation dicta-
torially, if only because the vanity of the normal male is not capacious
enough to accept such supreme responsibility. Aside from this, most
dictators are profound neurotics. Kamal Ataturk had a wildly disorderly
personal life; Dollfuss had a dwarf-complex; Pilsudski’s breathless
rages were pathological; Mussolini is something of a megalomaniac.
Of the lot, Stalin is probably the nearest to a normal human being,
but one should not forget that he was a criminal, viz., bombthrower,
in his youth.

The great Viennese psychiatrist Dr, Wilhelm Stekel has a theory
which accounts handily both for the neuroticism of dictators and for
the supine willingness of most people to submit to dictatorial rule. He
calls it the Authority Complex.

One must begin with the child. In every child, says Stekel, there is
a struggle between his own instincts and the lessons he derives from
the outer world. Children like, for instance, to be dirty. But they are

® Yet Hitler did not wait for his mother's death ; he departed for Vienna at 17,
and she did not die till the following year.

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF DICTATORS

taught by external education to be dean. Education is largely an effort
to mold a child in opposition to his original instincts. Education is
effected by authority. And authority becomes the child’s enemy, because
it means renouncement of his own instincts.

The first authority is that of the parents. If the parents are too weak
and the child is overtly defiant, then other authorities come into play.
The authority of older children. The authority of the teacher. In some
cases, the authority of the law. The authority, above all, of religion. The
final weapon in the hands of adults teaching authority to children is the
phrase, ‘‘God will punish you.”

Since about 1914 the authority of parents has tended to break down.
It is obvious that the family is no longer the sacred unit it once was.
‘‘Parents,” Stekel puts it, “did not respond themselves to the moral
standard which they demanded of their children.” Inevitably children
revolted at this unfairness. Parents sought stupidly or blindly to impose
on children the moral imperatives which they ignored, which left the
children no alternative but to revenge themselves by overthrowing
parental prohibitions.

As with parents, so with teachers. School and university were taken
less and less seriously. The Great War undermined authority interna-
tionally, and presently law and order within national boundaries suf-
fered: a flood of criminality deluged the world, especially in America.
Then too, religion had been displaced by modern science as a vital au-
thoritarian factor. Finally, young men and women asked how they
could longer believe in a God who permitted the war and the butchery
therein of some ten million men. Thus the principle of authority became
discredited, and the old belief and faith in authority collapsed.

Following this came the wave of dictators. The Hitlers and Mussolinis
were essentially father-substitutes. People may resent authority but they
cannot easily live without it in some form ; children have revolted against
their fathers, and Hitler, Mussolini, Pilsudski, Alexander of Jugoslavia,
Dollfuss, Kamal Ataturk, Stalin, replaced them. The modern child
thought his parents unworthy and thus sought an external leader. The
sphere of authority was moved outside the home.

How Dictators Rule

Fundamentally all government is a subtle combination of the forces
of fear and love. Dictators increase the dynamics of this process. Alex-
ander of Jugoslavia tried to win over the rebellious Croats at the same

INSIDE EUROPE

time that he dragooned them to submission. Little Dollfuss murdered
the socialists by artillery fire and then begged them to forgive him.
Hitler is beloved by many of his followers; just the same, the St.
Bartholomew of June 30 was necessary.

Why does the individual not resent the authority of the dictator, or
leader, just as he resented parental authority? The reason, according to
Stekel, is that individual doubt of the fallibility of the dictator is lessened
as more and more people come to follow and worship him. The greater
the number of followers, the less the necessity for doubt. “A psychic
epidemic of adoration’' floods the country, engulfing the whole nation
which prostrates itself at the dictator’s feet.

Moreover, Stekel says, as more and more people join the leader, their
merged inferiorities become a superiority. The people identify them-
selves with the leader. They partake of the flesh of his authority. They
become part of his soul and substance, and he of theirs. They share in
his Authority Complex. Germans, for instance, say that they don’t
fight for Hitler, but that Hitler fights for them. Mussolini does not
want power for himself, many Italians believe, but only for the sake
of Italy, viz , other Italians, viz., themselves. ‘‘Obedience and defiance,
love and hate, finally combine,” says Dr. Stekel, “and the dictator be-
comes the saviour.”

In older days new leaders were usually the founders of new religions.
Now they are political. Many present-day leaders are jealous of reli-
gion; they fear the implacable rivalry of the Authority of God. Thus,
very often, they try to kill religion, their strongest competitor, by seek-
ing to destroy the religious faith of their people; Kamal Ataturk dis-
established Islam, Stalin tried to root out the Orthodox Church.

Dictators are themselves usually neurotics because they too suffered
from the iron circumscription of the Authority Complex; they too
revolted against authority in childhood. But they were persons of supe-
rior mentality and will-power, and, after a miserable childhood, their
revolt was successful; they revenged themselves on their parents by
imposing authority on others. They became fathers, not of a family,
but of a nation.

Almost all the modern dictators (Alexander of Jugoslavia was an
exception) were bom in poverty. Mussolini and Stalin were wretchedly
poor. Moreover several dictators, like Hitler, underwent childhood
experiences of the most disastrous sort; Dollfuss, for instance, was
illegitimate. The dictators compensated for their bitter youth by search

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF DICTATORS

for power and glory afterwards. Power and glory, even achieved, may
not be anodynes enough. Thus Hitler seeks refuge in music, Mussolini
in a strenuous physical life; Kamal Ataturk sought it in alcohol.

Dictators reach power so easily, Stekel believes, because we, the
common people, seek to blame something for every crisis, and the
nearest and biggest and easiest things to blame are our institutions. So
the institutions fall, to give way to dictatorship. Dictators keep power
so easily because the force of arms is inherent in their systems, and
we, the common people — ^speaking broadly — ^like to be afraid.

Dehut

Hitler entered political life as a spy. The fact is unpleasant. The
story is fully told by Heiden. Hitler was a non-commissioned officer
in the German army, which had just become the Reichswehr, and he
was detailed early in 1919 as a sort of intelligence officer to attend
labor meetings, mingle with workers’ groups, and report to his superiors
the state of popular opinion. Fulfilling one of these missions, he heard
a man named Gottfried Feder speak. He was impressed by Feder’s vio-
lent economic theories, including the distinction between raffendes
(grasping, hence Jewish) and schaffendes (creative, hence Aryan)
capital ; he came again to hear him, and joined excitedly the discussion
following the meeting, squelching an opposition speaker.

Feder was closely in touch with an ex-locksmith, Anton Drexler,
who had formed a minuscule group of riffraff called the German
Workers Party. Presently, Hitler was invited to join this party. He
records his two days of “agonized meditation and questioning” before
giving assent. Then he became No. 7 not in the party itself (which at
the time numbered about sixty members) but in its council. This was
in July, 1919. Officially, however, until the next June, Hitler remained
in the service of his regiment.

The rise of the party under Hitler is history. He changed its name
to N.S.D.A.P. {National Sosialistische Deutsche Arheiter Partei), which,
usually shortened to “Nazi,” is still its official name. He spoke first to
audiences of twenty, then to twenty thousand. He founded his private
army, the SA, the Brown Shirts. He was ill-advised enough to attempt
a revolution in Munich in 1923 and was defeated and sentenced to jail
for high treason. This was the celebrated “Beer-hall Putsch.” He
emerged — Germany’s potential “saviour.”

It is well to underline two subsidiary but important points. One was

INSIDE EUROPE

that Hitler began to equivocate almost from the moment he seized
control of the party, so that he might win as many adherents as possible.
He stretched his net very wide. But it should not be forgotten that
Naziism began as a predominantly left-socialist movement, and the
party program, written by Feder and pronounced unalterable by Hitler,
was a distinctly anti-capitalist document. Hitler shed some socialism
as he marched toward power, but essentially his movement was radical
in political and economic beliefs. It appealed to the Have-Nots, to the
underpossessed. It was not merely, as the Marxish say, a ‘‘Front’' for
capitalism. It was itself definitely revolutionary.

The second point is Hitler's intimate association with army influences
almost from the beginning. He, as well as anyone, knew that the Reichs-
wehr would in time wield decisive influence in Germany. As much as
he dared, cautiously, cleverly, he cultivated the Reichswehr. It is not
generally known that he was enabled to purchase control of the VoU
kische Beobachter, which became the principal Nazi organ, through use
of Reichswehr funds. And gradually the army became his weapon.

Hitler took over the party from Drexler and Feder, but essentially
it was his creation. He cozened it, nurtured it, watched it grow, and
controlled it. The party came out of his own blood and heart. He
was helped, and not inconsiderably, by industrialists, by smart bureau-
crats and organizers ; but his was the feeding spirit, the dominating pulse.
He was himself responsible for the smallest details. He designed the
Swastika flag, for instance, and he shaped the general propaganda
methods, the like of which were never before seen in Germany — or
anywhere. The party was everything to Hitler. It was his wife, mother,
mistress, and all his children — ^at the end thirteen million of them.

Miracle of Nationality

Hitler became a German citizen only by virtue of machinery remark-
ably devious. He could not run for President against von Hindenburg
while still technically an Austrian subject. But the Reich Government
of the day had no intention of conferring statehood on its chief oppo-
nent, Therefore the Nazis had to resort to guile.

Dr. Frick, one of the earliest Hitlerites, the first Nazi to hold electoral
office in the Reich, was minister of education and the interior in Thu-
ringia. Citizenship would come automatically to Hitler if he became a
German official, and Frick therefore decided to appoint him commander
of gendarmerie in the inconspicuous hamlet of Hildburghausen. But

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF DICTATORS 29

news of this forcible/^naturalization” leaked out and when all Germany
laughed at the picture of Hitler as a Hildburghausen policeman the
plan was given up.

Subsequently another Nazi who held a governmental post, Dietrich
Klagges, the minister of justice in Brunswick, appointed Hitler to be
Counsellor of the Brunswick Legation in Berlin. Scarcely anyone in
Germany knew that such a post existed. Hitler took oath to be loyal
to the constitution — ^which he was openly threatening to destroy — and
the Austrian village boy became at long last — a German.

Chapter III

Who Killed the German Republic?

Everything has a cause and the cause of anything is every-
thing.

— W , J , Turner

P ERSONAL qualities alone would not have brought Hitler power.

But they contributed to one of the main factors that did — his feat
in identifying himself with a large percentage of the German nation.
He became a demigod, a prophet, because with great mesmeric ability
he persuaded so many Germans that he, and he alone, represented their
renascent Germanism. People love Hitler because they love Germany.
And Hitler and Germany — ^to Nazis — ^are one.

Germany was a loose aggregation of quarreling states until the dawn
of yesterday. Literature in a German language that can be read easily
to-day did not exist till the seventeenth century. England and France
unified themselves, constituted themselves homogeneous nations, in the
Middle Ages ; but even Bismarck did not make Germany a nation in the
sense that England and France had been nations for five centuries.

Germany, the Nazi apologists say, is now at long last growing up.
Adolescence produces pangs in children as well as nations, and no one
becomes mature without suffering. The frightfulness of the Nazi terror,
the confusions in personnel and administration, the lies and disingenu-
ousness of foreign policy, the war-mongering and finally the outbreak of
the war in 1939, the extraordinary capacity to blunder and irritate
everybody in the outside world (i.e., grown-ups) — ^these are evidences
of a period of puberty.

Germany lost the war of 1914. It was an honorable defeat and in fact
Germany came within a hair’s breadth of beating the entire world;
nevertheless the Germans felt ‘^humiliation” ; they felt degradation and
shame. The Nazis invented the legend of having been stabbed in the
back by the Jews, socialists, pacifists — ^to excuse defeat. Hitler made
immense capital of this unconscionable distortion of the facts. And he

WHO KILLED THE GERMAN REPUBLIC? 31

progressed to another deduction, equally false — that Germany had not,
in fact, lost the war at all.

His technique was something like the following. He suggested to the
German people first that they were sick, second that he alone could make
them well. His argument was passionate and direct : “You are humiliated.
You are degraded. Germany is a sick nation. Admit it. Concede the ex-
tent of your misery. You have been trying to persuade yourselves that
you are content with this miserable republic. . . . Those who stabbed
you in the back, the Jews and the Marxists, are ruling you to-day. They
prevent you from recovering your self-respect. They are the spiritual
death of your nation. And your own spiritual death too. For you are
Germany. JVe are Germany. Be men! Out with the traitors, the
Jews, the pacifists, the republicans. . . (And so on, in the early
speeches, often for two hours and a half.)

These speeches had an immense emotional effect. Women, especially,
were overcome by them. If the audience was full of women. Hitler
would shriek out, “You are mine, and I am yours, as long as I live T'
So Hitler presented the Germans, who are idealists, who are exceptionally
sensitive, who had had a very rough time, with their lost “self-respect."'
Suppression of liberty was the price they were willing to pay for his
leadership.

The same technique is manifest in Mein Kampf, Compare this book
with, say, the autobiographies of Trotsky or Henry Adams. It is vapid,
vain, rhetorical, diffuse, prolix. But it is a powerful and moving book,
the product of great passionate feeling. The theme is stated twenty
times, slowly rising out of clouds of circumlocution and confusion, that
Germany has been disunited, mortified, crucified, by the peace treaties,
and that it must and will arise, a new, powerful, united, regenerated,
national state.

One can well imagine hundreds of thousands of honest Germans,
from dispossessed shopkeepers to General Blomberg, conscientiously,
dutifully picking their way through this turbulent ocean of print, sink-
ing back from it exhausted, but with its message, if only by the ceaseless
repetition of the argument, left impregnably in their minds, fecund and
germinating.

A number of elements quite outside Hitler's own character con-
tributed, of course, to his meteoric, incredible career. What set the course
of that savage, swooping arrow, Briining-Papen-Schleicher-Hitler? One
should keep in mind the following items ;

INSIDE EUROPE

1. The German inflation which was the result of passive resistance
to the French invasion of the Ruhr, because it ruined the lower middle
class, the petite bourgeome, and caused it to seize on Hitler’s extrava-
gant promises.

2. The deflationary policy of Bruning which helped to crush the
upper middleclass, already hard hit by the world economic crisis. Hard
times bred both the violence of Hitler and the apathy of his opponents.
The Nazis fed on other people’s hunger.

3. The support of the great industrialists, chiefly the steel magnate
Fritz Thyssen, who from 1930 on helped finance the Nazi party. This
support was important. It was not, however, decisive. Hitleiism was
a tremendous national movement before the industrialists, seeing how
the road led — ^years late — ^jumped on the bandwagon. The idea that
Thyssen manufactured the Nazi movement by giving Hitler thousand-
mark bills in a back room is simply monstrous, as Raymond Gram
Swing has pointed out. As soon as the industrialists belatedly got around
to seeing that Hitler was dangerous, and also might turn to be useful,
they sought to buy him up. They hoped to make Hitler their puppet.
But they were mistaken.

4. Sabotage of the republic by its own officials, army officers, and
government administrators ; coupled with the extremely democratic char-
acter of the Weimar constitution whereby demagoguery got every chance
to express itself in votes.

5. Finally, personal considerations. A great number of personal im-
ponderables helped blow Hitler into port. The first of these was the
mind and character of the old president, Field-Marshal Paul Ludwig
Hans von Beneckendorf und von Hindenburg. His mind and character — >
plus the coruscation of intrigue blazing around him as he aged.

To understand properly Hitler’s seizure of Germany and his estab-
lishment of power we must tell the story of three great episodes: the
Papen-Schleicher-Hindenburg conspiracies, the Reichstag fire, and the
events of the 30th of June. Let us begin with Hindenburg. To be blunt,
it is quite possible that Hitler would never have become chancellor
had not Hindenburg been senile.

The Squire of Neudeck

In the critical year, 1932, Hindenburg was already eighty-five and
not in full possession of his faculties. He was “all right,” people said,
until about the beginning of the morning, and those rare personages

WHO KILLED THE GERMAN REPUBLIC 1 33

who could get to him at breakfast, or even earlier, could do something
with him. This was the great strength of Franz von Papen, for a time
his chancellor.

In Berlin at the time the health of the Old Man was a paramount
interest, and a marvelous and cruel miscellany of jokes grew up at his
expense, hinging on the question of his competency. It was no joking
matter; the person of the President was the most powerful constitu^
tional force in the country. But no one could talk or write openly on such
a delicate matter : thus the retreat to an apocrypha of legend.

One of the Hmdenburg stories had him turning in puzzled recollec-
tion to his son Oskar and asking, '"Where has that chap with glasses
(Bruning) gone to?^’ Another alleged that he confused Bruning with
Schleicher when Schleicher was dismissed. And once, the story goes, he
received General von Hammerstein, the chief of the Reichswehr; the
general had some pretty important business on his mind but Hmdenburg
began and ended the interview by shouting, "Herr General, I was not
satisfied with the autumn maneuvers.”

When Hitler finally became chancellor, the Old Man — ^watching the
immense parade of Nazi storm-troops celebrating the occasion — care-
fully unhinged his old knees to sit down and said to Oskar, "Son, I did
not know we had captured quite so many Russian prisoners.”

A favorite story, while Hindenburg was alive, detailed the alleged
circumstances of his death. Kneeling at the bar of heaven, he was re-
ceived by St. Peter who, glancing at him in surprise, asked him his
identity. "I am Hindenburg,” the field marshal replied. "But why are
you here ?” continued St. Peter. "Because I am dead,” replied Hinden-
burg. St. Peter shook his head saying, "There has been an error : you
are not dead, but alive.” Hindenburg retreated in confusion : "Ha ! That
rascal Meissner has misinformed me again !”

Meissner, the state secretary to the President, wielded great influ-
ence on the Old Man, because next to Oskar he was nearest to his
person. Meissner was, and is, a remarkably subtle politician. He has
continuously been state secretary to all three German presidents — ^Ebert,
the socialist, Hmdenburg, the field marshal, Hitler, the Nazi — ^an office-
holding feat of no small quality. It is said that Hindenburg, knowing
that his health and mind were failing, appealed to Meissner to be a
super-efficient watchdog, to "protect” him from breaking his oath, that
is, the oath to preserve the Weimar constitution. It is also said that the
Nazis "got to” Hindenburg — ^through Meissner.

INSIDE EUROPE

Meissner^s influence was always palpable, but it diminished toward
the end, as the Old Man, adrift in a perpetual maelstrom of crises and
appeals to the German nation, unable to make head or tail of the in-
trigues going on, more and more hesitant to trust anyone, came inevitably
to supreme dependence on the one person so close to him that question
of faith did not arise — ^the flesh of his own flesh, Oskar, his son.

Oskar was no stripling. He was a veteran officer. He had no taste for
politics. But politics were all around him. General von Schleicher, later
to become chancellor, was a fellow-officer in his regiment, the Third
Potsdamer Foot Guards, and gradually, with Schleicher’s connivance, a
palace cmnarilla rose, with Oskar leading it. The chief business of the
camarilla was ‘‘protection” of the aged President. Soon he was prac-
tically isolated from other contacts.

Every politician who wanted to see Hindenburg — ^the supreme reposi-
tory of power — ^had to penetrate the wall of the camarilla first. The
power of the camarilla grew. The Nazis did their best to gain the Presi-
dent’s isolated ear. For a long time, however, Oskar and Schleicher and
their crowd, aristocrats and Junkers, despising Hitler as a parvenu and
a corporal, fended them off. In 1928 a group of Prussian notables had
presented Hindenburg with an estate at Neudeck, thus fulfilling the Old
Man’s dearest dream: to become a landowner, a country squire. Im-
mediately after Hitler became chancellor, the Government of Prussia
presented him with an additional five thousand acres of land. The title
was made out in Oskar’s name, in order to avoid inheritance tax, since
it was clear that Hindenburg pere could not possibly live much longer.

(Acquisition of the Neudeck estate promptly produced a new joke
when the Hitler government began to function. Q. “What is the newest
and smallest concentration camp in Germany?” A. “Neudeck.”)

The camarilla exerted power chiefly because the Reichstag parliament
met only stertorously and for short intervals (in the two years between
December, 1930, and November, 1932, it did not pass a single law) and
because the President, and the President alone, possessed the power of
appointing a chancellor and giving him authority to dismiss the Reichs-
tag if it were unruly. Intrigue reached a Borgia-point. Between the
palace camp, the army camp, the Nazi camp, there was espionage galore.
Bruning occasionally amused visitors whom he trusted by pointing up
his fireplace and showing them where he imagined a dictaphone —
Schleicher’s probably — ^to be.

WHO KILLED THE GERMAN REPUBLIC?

Bruning, Papen, Schleicher

Dr. Heinrich Bruning was chancellor of Germany from May, 1930,
to May, 1932. He was the most enlightened and civilized statesman that
modern Germany has produced. He was a machine-gunner during the
war; he entered politics as a Catholic labor-union executive. Even old
Junkers like Oldenburg-Januschau had to call him the “best since Bis-
marck.’’ He devotedly defended the Weimar constitution; was largely
responsible for Hindenburg’s reelection as President; took the bold
step of outlawing the Brown Shirts, exiling them for a brief period
from the streets ; sensibly sought to give Germany the victory in foreign
policy it needed by proposing the Austro-German customs-union;
brought the reparations problem almost to settlement ; and was cast out
by Hindenburg like a dog.

Bruning detested Hitler, personally and politically, but he begat him.
The Leit-Motiv of the two Bruning years was defense of the republic
against Hitler. The Nazi leader rose to his first great electoral victory
after Bruning became chancellor, with 6,400,000 votes and one hundred
and seven deputies. Hitler, before 1930, was half a joke. After 1930
he was a tremendous phenomenon. It is one of the most tragic of mod-
em ironies that Briining, of all men, by the force of terrible circum-
stances, made way for Hitler. This was because, with the best intentions
in the world, Bruning destroyed the German constitution.

In 1930, simply in order to be able to govern at all, Bruning had
been forced to dissolve the Reichstag and govern by decree. He was
not the first to do so. Decrees began under Ebert. But Bruning signed
them wholesale. He thus founded a system of double government, for
the Reichstag permitted him decrees even when it was sitting. The
Reichstag drew a razor across its own throat. This was because the
Social Democrats, still the largest party, wanted to tolerate him but
could not openly support his deflationary measures, which reduced
wages and hurt the working class. Bruning reaped the inevitable har-
vest ; he became responsible not to the Will of the Reichstag but to the
Whim of the President. Once Hindenburg withdrew confidence in him
he was doomed, because he had inadvertently destroyed the authority
of the body, the Reichstag, to which he should have been responsible.
This set a precedent for future chancellors. They were henceforth no
more than creatures of Hindenburg, and presently the camarilla.
“Presidential” Germany began.

INSIDE EUROPE

By 1932 Briining, in the opinion o£ the Hindenburg group, had out-
lived his usefulness. He had weakened his position vis-a-vis the Nazis
by his bold dissolution of the Brown Shirts ; vis-d-vis the socialists by
his policy of drastic cutting of the social services ; and, most important,
vis-d-vis the camanlla by announcing a program of agrarian settlement
(to reduce unemployment) on bankrupt Junker estates. This mortally
offended and terrified the Neudeck clique. Hindenburg, at the end of
May, 1932, was quietly shipped off to his estates, where he was isolated
from everyone, even Bruning, Schleicher remained in Berlin and
undertook secret communication with Oskar in Neudeck. A troop of
whisperers called on Hindenburg, telling him that Bruning was an
^‘agrarian Bolshevik.” He went to Neudeck to ask additional powers:
Hindenburg refused to grant them, and out Briining went — ^like a
gnawed bone.

It was now clear that the man behind the scenes was Major-General
Kurt von Schleicher, the secretary of state in the ministry of defense.
He represented in this tense and covert struggle for power what was
still the most important element in Germany, the Reichswehr, the army.
Schleicher was a headquarters officer during the war. He spent most of
the four years far away from the Front, in Berlin. Don't say he wasn't
smart.

From 1923 on he had been a rising influence. In 1924 he was execu-
tive officer to von Seeckt, then head of the Reichswehr. Later he broke
with von Seeckt. He “made” his subsequent superior, the Reichswehr
minister General Groener; then he “broke” Groener. And he was the
discoverer of Bruning, whom he subsequently destroyed. Schleicher by
1930 had become the political specialist of the Reichswehr, an “indis-
pensable link between the army and political life.” His power was based
partly on his great gifts of character, partly because the army, as an
army, became increasingly dominant in German affairs to the exact pro-
portion that civil politics became chaotic and obscure.

But when Hindenburg dismissed Bruning it was not Schleicher but
Franz von Papen who, on June i, 1932, became chancellor of the Reich.
No mystery to this, though Papen was virtually unknown. Papen had
been picked by Schleicher for the job. Papen, as people in Berlin ex-
pressed it, was a “front” for Schleicher, someone to put out his chin on
his behalf. And then an amazing thing happened Old Hindenburg, who
had scarcely known Papen, fell in love with him. A Junker, an officer
and a gentleman, suave, quick-witted, a member of the Herrenklub, of

WHO KILLED THE GERMAN REPUBLIC? 37

impeccable manners and great charm, Papen became the palace favorite.
Within a few weeks of his arrival at Neudeck he had completely cap-
tured the Old Man’s confidence. He breakfasted with him as a member
of the family, and strode in and out the palace as he pleased.

But Papen’s chancellorship, much to his well-bred distress, was short.
He had to go, despite his popularity in the palace, because he was so
fantastically unpopular in the country. Germany was still theoretically
a republic, governed by the democratic constitution of Weimar, and on
assuming the chancellorship Papen had to call an election. He waited
till the last possible day, July 31, and was overwhelmingly beaten. It
was at this election that the Nazis reached their top — 13,700,000 votes.

Hitler burned for power. As leader of the largest party, he was
received by Hindenburg. Papen was present. Hitler behaved awkwardly
and started to rant; he demanded the chancellorship on his own terms
and asked the same powers that Mussolini had been granted after the
march on Rome; he was contemptuously rejected by Hindenburg. The
Old Man told Papen, '"Let Hitler mend his manners, or I will appoint
him postmaster some place where he can lick my backside on postage
stamps.” Wild with fury. Hitler sought to overthrow Papen in the
Reichstag; Papen circumvented him by dissolving the body instantly
it met.^

Prussia, the largest state in the Reich, was still — ^it should be inter-
polated — ^ruled by the Social Democrats. Papen determined upon a coup
to annihilate them. Without the shadow of legal authority, he dis-
missed the socialist leaders, Braun and Severing. Although they might
have replied by force or called a general strike, the socialists meekly
submitted to arrest. This event was premonition of the death to the
republic. It showed Papen, Schleicher — ^and the Nazis — ^that the will
and spirit of the republic had already perished. And it set the example
for similar lawlessness in Prussia by Goering later.

Papen, his parliament dissolved, had to call new elections. They oc-
curred on November 6 and again he took a terrific beating. His first
Reichstag sat exactly eleven days, his second exactly three. But this
procedure — election, repudiation, dissolution — could not go on indefi-
nitely, even in Germany. The people were tired of balloting. The Nazis

^ This was the first Reichstag of which Goering was president. Papen had a
narrow escape With his customary imperturbable casualness, he had forgotten to
bring with him the Presidential decree, signed in advance, authorizing the dissolu-
tion; he retrieved it just in time.

INSIDE EUROPE

dropped two million votes in the November election; so they joined
the communists in a Berlin traffic strike, and made threats of united
action in a general strike. This scared both the army and the palace.
Nobody knew quite what to do. The camarilla hesitated; Hindenburg
blinked ; and Papen went.

After a prolonged crisis Schleicher was pushed into the chancellorship
himself. He took the job only after a fortnight of worry and negotia-
tion; he would have much preferred to continue to rule from behind
the scenes, or from the impregnable Reichswehr ministry. But there was
no one else. The camarilla was running out of men. Schleicher lasted
less than two months. It may surprise people, but he gave promise of an
excellent administration. Schleicher despised Hitler and would have
kept him from office ; he was friendly with labor ; he believed in a strong,
moderate Germany, and he took a strong, moderate course. And so he
came to commit unforgivable sins. To wit: he flirted with the trade
unions; he announced himself neither capitalist nor socialist; he per-
mitted scandals about the Osthilfe relief to come out ; he even took up
Brunmg's scheme for colonizing the bankrupt Junker estates. Also, he
was too confident, too ambitious, and too clever by half. People dis-
trusted him, and once Hindenburg is said to have barked at him, ‘'When,
Herr General, are you going to lead the army against me

Above all, Schleicher was vanquished by the same thing that funda-
mentally had beaten both Bruning and Papen — failure to make terms
with Hitler, failure somehow to solve the Nazi problem. It was utterly
impossible to ignore the pressure of the Nazi movement. The Nazis
had just lost two million votes, and were momentarily distracted by the
defection of Gregor Strasser, then Hitler's second in command; even
so, no government could move an inch without considering their power.
Already they dominated Germany.

Strasser, the head of Hitler's political organization, commanded be-
tween thirty or forty deputies, and his rebellion might have split the
Nazi party. Schleicher had been intriguing with him, and he wanted to
join the general in a coalition. Hitler squashed him. The episode is a
revealing instance of Hitler's shrewd political sense, his implacability,
and his tactics. What did Hitler do, faced with this formidable mutiny?
He did not dismiss Strasser from the party, as Stalin or Mussolini
might have done. Instead he summoned a meeting of all the Nazi depu-
ties. Strasser himself was present. Ignoring him, Hitler began to speak,
somewhat as follows :

WHO KILLED THE GERMAN REPUBLIC?

“In every group of men there is likely to be a Judas. One of the
things about a Judas is that he believes there are other Judases too. We
have a Judas in our midst. This Judas of ours has spread reports of
growing disaffection. But is he right? Do others share this baseness, this
treachery of character ?’’ Hitler paused. All eyes were turned on Strasser.
Hitler pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. His secret service, within
the party, was of the best.

“Apparently our other Judases do exist,” Hitler proceeded. “Not
only do they exist ; I have their names. Do you want to hear the names
of these other Judases, who would destroy our unity, disrupt our party?”
Consternation. Hitler began reading names. Deputy A. Deputy B. And
so on. All the names of those deputies whom he knew sympathized with
Strasser. As each name was read. Hitler turned sharply to the man,
saying, “Is it correct? Is it true that you are a Judas?” One and all,
naturally, leaped to their feet, screaming denunciation on Strasser, loyalty
to Hitler. It was only necessary to read the first few names. The meet-
ing exploded into a pandemonium of violent fidelity.^

The Strasser interlude was over. What next? The Nazis were still a
tidal wave of almost twelve million voters and no bulwark in a demo-
cratic system could withstand the pressure of such a torrent. It was
impossible to suppress the Nazis, impossible — so it was thought then — ^to
give them carte blanche. The Nazis had to be seduced into the govern-
ment or they might destroy Germany in civil war involuntarily. Yet
Hitler, still smarting from the rebuff in August, steadily refused to enter
any coalition save on prohibitive terms. Something had to be given him —
but what?

Mighty Mase — But Not Without a Plan!^*

Hitler might have made a civil war, but his whole policy was based on
getting office by legal means. He was nicknamed, contemptuously,
“Adolf e Legalite.” Perhaps his fear of risking a fight was patriotic;
perhaps it was cowardice derived from the cold steel of 1923, His vanity,
moreover, was supreme enough to suggest dictatorship of a type new to
history, a dictatorship chosen voluntarily by the people, voted into

2 A few days later Hitler was returning to Berlin from Munich. His chief lieu-
tenants met him at the station Strasser, contrite, was among them. Hitler slowly-
greeted each man, shook his hand; and cut Strasser dead. Strasser, agape, was left
standing on the platform. He was murdered, penalty for his rebellion, on June 30*

1934.

INSIDE EUROPE

power. But he did not have quite the necessary votes. He was too
timid to use force. Therefore — ^intrigue.

The details are confused, a violent explosion of tangled plot and
counter-plot.

First, Papen, who was Schleicher^s creature, turned against him. He
subtly began to influence Hindenburg against him too. Having tasted
glory, Papen wanted more. Partyless (he had been expelled from the
Center), thirsting for position, he joined the Nationalists of Dr. Hugen-
berg, the industrialist publisher, and leader of the big-capital reactionaries.
Second, Papen, turning on all his charm, contrived to meet Hitler secretly
in the home of the banker Schroeder in Cologne. He succeeded in per-
suading Hitler — ^at last — ^to envisage the possibility of coalition.

The Hitler forces were summoning new strength. Hitler rightly re-
garded Schleicher as the last hurdle between himself and power. Wor-
ried, Schleicher called a secret meeting in the Reichswehr ministry. It
is said that creation of a military dictatorship was discussed, with the
arrest of Papen and Hugenberg. Received by the Old Man, Schleicher
cautiously informed him that the situation was serious, that the Reichs-
wehr might have to go into the streets against the Nazis. Schleicher's
threat was probably a bluff. He wanted to frighten Papen and Hugen-
berg. But the threat didn't work.

For hearing that Schleicher planned to call out the army, Papen
and Hitler met again. The situation had developed beautifully to Papen's
hand. He was now in a position to say to Hitler, ‘Tf you don't join us
now — on our terms — ^we are both lost. Schleicher will set the army on
both of us. We must make a coalition." Hitler agreed and accepted
terms that hitherto had been impossible for him — ^three seats in the
cabinet as against Papen-Hugenberg's eight.

Papen, Hugenberg, Hitler went to Hindenburg at eleven at night, an
unprecedented intrusion (January 29, 1933) and roused the Old Man
from sleep. They told him that Schleicher was going to call out the
army, going to make civil war. The President was dumbfounded. Then
drowsily he remembered that the general had indeed — ^but in a quite
different connection — ^threatened that use of force might be necessary.

Schleicher, disastrously out-Schleichered, was victim of his own in-
trigue, because Hitler and Hugenberg presented Papen's plan for a
Nazi-Nationalist government, and the Old Man fell for it. He appointed
Hitler chancellor, Papen vice-chancellor. Then he rolled round and fell
back to sleep. This occurred, an amazing point, before Schleicher, who

WHO KILLED THE GERMAN REPUBLIC? 4^

was chancellor, had been dismissed. It was not till next morning that
the general, to his bewildered stupefaction, discovered himself out of
office. When he heard the news, he walked in a long oval around his
room, whispering to himself, head half bent.

(Bruning said, ‘T was badly treated — ^but poor Schleicher — ^five times
worse.’")

Hindenburg thought that he had thoroughly safeguarded himself hy
drawing Hitler’s sting. It was established that Hitler should never be
received by the Old Man except in Papen’s presence. So did democracy
die in the Reich. So did Adolf Hitler, who had become a German citizen
only a year before, find himself chancellor of Germany.

And little did Papen, Hindenburg or anyone reckon on the next
bizarre development — ^the Reichstag fire.

Chapter IV

The Trick by Fire and the
Purge by Blood

Goering discloses the jact that the late Kurt von Schleicher
plotted a coup against the Reich in ip 33 . We knew the Nasis
would find out some day what they shot him for.

— Howard Brubaker

/^N THE night of February 27, 1933, a few days before the March 5
elections which were to confirm Hitler's chancellorship, the build-
ing of the German Reichstag in Berlin was gutted by fire. This fire
destroyed what remained of the German republic. It not only burned a
public building ; it incinerated the communist, social democratic. Catho-
lic, and nationalist parties of Germany. It was discovered at about nine-
fifteen on a winter evening back in 1933 ; but its embers are burning yet.

The Reichstag fire ruined a couple of million marks' worth of glass
and masonry. It also ruined some thousands of human lives. Logically,
inevitably, the fire produced the immense Nazi electoral victory of
March 5, the savageries of the subsequent Brown Terror, the persecu-
tion of the Jews, the offensive against Austria, the occupation of Czecho-
slovakia, the invasion of Poland, and the enormous process of Gleichschal-
tung, or forcible assimilation, which steam-rollered over Germany.

The fire turned an imposing edifice to dust and ashes. Also it turned
to dust and ashes the lifework of many thousands of pacifists, liberals,
democrats, socialists, decent-minded people of all sorts and classes. But
for the fire the Nazis would never have gained so sweeping and crushing
a victory. In the flames of the Reichstag fire disappeared the old Ger-
many of Bismarck, William II, and the Weimar constitution. In its
smoke arose Hitler's Third Reich.

“When Germany awoke," Douglas Reed wrote, “a man's home was
no longer his castle. He could be seized by private individuals, could
claim no protection from the police, could be indefinitely detained with-
out preferment of charges ; his property could be seized, his verbal and

TRICK BY FIRE AND THE PURGE BY BLOOD 43

written communications overheard and perused; he no longer had the
right to foregather with his fellow countrymen, and his newspapers
might no longer freely express their opinions.”

The actual course of events the night of February 27 is quickly told.
Smoke and flames were seen from the windows of the Reichstag, in
the heart of Berlin near one end of the Unter den Linden, at about nine-
fifteen P.M, The fire brigade was there by nine-twenty-five. The main
hall was already a roaring caldron. The ramparts of the building were
saved but the interior was gutted. Incendiarism was soon suspected. The
fire had started simultaneously in a great number of places — ^between
twenty and thirty in all, according to a subsequent official report Goering
and Hitler arrived within an hour and at once said the fire was the work
of communists. sign from Heaven!” Hitler exclaimed, as he sur-
veyed the ruins.

The background of these events may also be briefly sketched. Hitler,
as we know, had become Reichskanzler. He had only three Nazis in the
cabinet as against eight belonging to Papen-Hugenberg, but he had not
the faintest thought of playing second-string to them. To accomplish
supremacy a great increase in Nazi votes in the March 5 elections was
necessary. Hitler desperately needed what he had never had before, a
clear majority of Reichstag seats, Papen-Hugenberg were equally de-
termined to prevent this. There was much bad feeling between Hitler
and the nationalists. Fighting on a common front, they were fighting
each other in reality, because each wanted to dominate the ensuing
government.

Things were not going too well with Hitler. Hindenburg still dis-
trusted him. There were wild rumors that Hitler would seek to depose
him by force. The Nazis feared that they were going to lose votes.
Only one thing might save them by giving them a clear majority. There
would be, it was estimated, about six hundred deputies in the new
Reichstag, and the communist party was bound to get about one hundred
of them. The Nazis claimed about two hundred and fifty. Well, two
hundred and fifty is not a clear majority of six hundred; but it was
half of five hundred. Therefore, suppress the communist party and
wipe out those critical one hundred seats, and all was won.

At first the Nazis decided to raid the Karl Liebknecht house, the
communist party headquarters in Berlin, incriminate the communists in
conspiracy to revolt, and thus obtain a pretext to suppress them. The
raid was carried out, but it was a failure. The date for the elections was

INSIDE EUROPE

rapidly approaching. Tension between Hitler and Papen-Hugenberg in-
creased. The Nazis had to think of something else — m a hurry. They
did.

The fire produced exactly what the Nazis hoped for. This we have
seen.

The one hundred communist deputies were arrested. A state of virtual
siege was proclaimed. The provisions of the constitution guaranteeing
individual liberty were suppressed. Plans for a communist outbreak were
'‘revealed.” Germany rose with a roar. There was intense public excite-
ment. The Nazis stormed the country, and Hitler was able to maneuver
himself into a dictatorship for four years, affix himself to power im-
movably, unshakably.

Arson de Luxe

The true story of the fire is not so well known to-day as it might be.
The Nazis did their job so well that, whereas everyone well informed
instantly suspected them of complicity, there was much puzzlement as
to details. Even to-day there are mysteries, subsidiary mysteries, not
entirely clear. Let us deal with them.

During the night of the fire a Dutch half-wit named Marinus Van
der Lubbe was arrested when police found him in the burning ruins.
There were no witnesses except the police to his arrest. The first state-
ments about the Dutchman, issued by Goering, were false. It was said
that he had a membership-card of the communist party on his person, a
leaflet urging common action between socialists and communists, several
photographs of himself, and a passport. Obliging fellow ! He did possess
the passport, but not the other documents, as the trial subsequently
proved

His career and movements were closely traced. He had set three other
fires — ^minor ones — ^in Berlin just before the Reichstag fire. In 1929 he
had joined something called the Dutch Communist Youth Organization,
a secessionist group. Two years later he was expelled from this as a
worthless and stupid fellow. He never belonged to the communist party
itself. Van der Lubbers itinerary the few days before the fire was well
established. As late as the night of February 17-18 he slept at Glinow,
near Potsdam. He could not have got to Berlin before the 19th or 20th.
Yet inside a week he, an unknown hobo, either (a) so insinuated him-
(Self into the graces of the rigidly articulated communist party as to be

TRICK BY FIRE AND THE PURGE BY BLOOD 45

given the dangerous and delicate job of firing the Reichstag, or (b) was
hired to do it by someone else.

When it became clear, even in Germany, that the Van der Lubbe
explanation simply would not hold water, the mystery thickened. The
police got to the point of having to admit that Van der Lubbe had
confederates. But how, carrying incendiary material, could enough of
them possibly have penetrated the Reichstag walls, doorways, or win-
dows in the middle of Berlin without being seen?

The German authorities themselves let the cat out of the bag, and an
astounding cat it proved to be. It was announced that the incendiaries
had presumably entered and escaped from the building by means of an
underground tunnel leading from the Reichstag basement to the palace
of the speaker of the Reichstag — Goering — ^across the street. Originally
this tunnel was part of the Reichstag’s central heating system. Until
an official communique revealed its existence not a dozen persons in
Berlin had ever heard of it. So one aspect of the mystery was solved.
The incendiaries, whoever they were, got in and out of the Reichstag
building — ^through Goering’s back yard. Incredible information !

An ostrich sticks its head in the sand — well-meaning but stupid ostrich.
There is an obverse of the ostrich process. A man may naively and
stridently call attention to something he wishes to conceal, hoping thereby
to lessen interest in it. A squirrel hides a nut under a tree. Then he
squats and points at it, showing where it is. Disingenuously a man may
reveal what is embarrassing to him, hoping thus to modify the terms of
the embarrassment.

Long before the trial opened the accusation that the Nazis themselves
had burned the building had impressed the world. A mock trial was
held in London. The Brown Book, telling part of the story — ^but im
accurately — ^was published by emigres and widely circulated. Moreover,
a secret nationalist memorandum, written to the order of a prominent
deputy named Oberfohren, was passed from hand to hand. Oberfohren
was a nationalist, a Junker, one of Papen’s men. He asserted flatly that
the Nazis were the incendiaries. In June, a Nazi detachment searched
his flat; mystery for some time surrounded Oberfohren’s whereabouts.
Then it was announced that he had “shot himself.”

The half-wit Van der Lubbe was not the only person arrested. Ernst
Torgler, chairman of the communist bloc in the Reichstag, gave himself
up to the police when he heard the announcement incredible to his ears
that he was accused of complicity; subsequently three Bulgarian com-

INSIDE EUROPE

mumsts, Dimitrov, Popov, and Tanev, were arrested, when a waiter
who had served them in a Berlin cafe told the police that their activities
had been ‘'suspicious/’ Dimitrov was in Munich, not Berlin, on the
night of the fire, as an incontrovertible alibi proved ; nevertheless he was
held for five months until the trial, without a scrap of evidence against
him.

Trial

I covered the trial in Leipzig and Berlin during its first six weeks.
The court sat for fifty-seven days, and provided superlative drama. The
trial was neither a farce nor a frame-up. The behavior of the police and
judicial authorities before the trial was outrageous, but once the pro-
ceedings reached the court-room there was a difference. The court got
itself into a curious dilemma, of having to pretend to be fair even while
exercising the greatest animus against the defendants, and little by little
this necessity — caused mostly by the pressure of foreign opinion — ^to
simulate justice led to some modicum of justice in the court-room.

When the trial opened, I think, the judges like many people in Ger-
many genuinely thought that Van der Lubbe was a communist and that
the communists were guilty. The prosecution thought so too and assum-
ing that the trial would be quick and easy it made no serious effort to
fabricate a "good” case. As the hearings went on it became evident even
to the judges that there was no case at all. The evidence of the prosecu-
tion was a mystifying confusion of inaccuracies, contradictions, and plain
lies. But once the trial started, it couldn’t be stopped. With dreadful
pertinacity, with true Teutonic thoroughness, the court plodded on,
deeper every day in a morass of evidence that ineluctably proved just
what it didn’t want proved — ^the innocence of the accused. The prosecu-
tion, panicky, began to produce incredible cranks as witnesses, whom even
the judges couldn’t stomach; the judges, nervous, threw Dimitrov out
of court whenever his questions became too intolerably pointed — ^which
was often.

No one, of course, counted on the brilliant gallantry of Dimitrov.
This Bulgarian revolutionary had, moreover, brains. Unerringly he
picked every flaw in the testimony of a dishonest witness ; unerringly he
asked just those questions most damaging to the prosecution. He turned
the trial into a public forum. The trial started as an attempt to pin the
guilt of the Reichstag arson on the defendants. Dimitrov turned it

TRICK BY FIRE AND THE PURGE BY BLOOD 47

before long into an action precisely opposite: one seeking to clear the
Nazis of the same charge.

Also Dimitrov, if only because he is the only man in recorded history
to have made Goenng turn publicly red in the neck, contributed deeply
to the pure joy of living. When a witness could not be found, he asked:
*‘Have you looked for him in a concentration camp ?’’ When the judge
rebuked him for making communist propaganda, Dimitrov pointed to
Goering — on the witness-stand — and said with a subtle combination of
impudence and perfect courtesy: ‘‘But he’s making National Socialist
propaganda !” No one who saw him will ever forget Dimitrov pointing
to Lubbe and exclaiming, in his picturesque Balkan German: “This
miserable Faust! Who is his Mephistopheles ?” Nor the climax to his
final speech when, imperturbable as ever with the executioner’s ax or
Goering’s private vengeance facing him, he demanded of the court
“compensation for his wasted time!”

Once the court was forced into calling every relevant witness, like
porters and workmen in the Reichstag building, the floodgates were
open. Hot little clews dodged out Lubbe, inert, apathetic, testified —
in one of his few lucid moments — ^that he had been “with Nazis” the
night before the fire. A gateman testified that a Nazi deputy. Dr.
Albrecht, left the burning building, in great excitement, as late as ten
P.M. A servant in Goering’s house, Aldermann, testified that he heard,
on several nights before the fire, mysterious sounds in the underground
tunnel. Thus the fire — ^got hot.

Mystery

The court had no option but to acquit Torgler, Dimitrov, Popov, and
Tanev; Van der Lubbe was sentenced to death and presently decapi-
tated. (Torgler, one should interpolate, was held in “protective custody”
for two years after the trial, though the court declared him innocent.)
The Dutchman died with his lips sealed, and with him to the grave
went one secret — ^how exactly he and the incendiaries had worked
together.

It was quite clear that he could not have set the fire alone. He was
armed with household fire-lighters only; the expert evidence proved
that some self-combustible chemical, phosphorus and sulphur, besides
large quantities of petrol, which Lubbe could not possibly have carried,
were used in the central hall of the Reichstag chamber. He was half
blind; he shambled rather than walked; the Reichstag was a dark, urn

INSIDE EUROPE

familiar building, composed of stone and heavy wood ; yet two minutes
five seconds (the reenactment proved) after he entered the building,
the central hall was fiercely burning.

It was also quite clear that Van der Lubbe was not an overt agent
provocateur hired by the Nazis. This theory, for a long time popular,
had to be given up immediately Lubbe took the stand. The Nazis could
not possibly have deliberately picked an agent so inept and witless. Lubbe
was an obvious victim of manic-depressive psychosis. He could hardly
have been acting. Nor was he drugged. He was no friend of the Nazis,
and the court was terrified every time he opened his mouth.

Thus this mystery: If Van der Lubbe acted independently of the
Nazis, how could the fire have been so physically successful ? If he acted
with the Nazis, why did he all but give them away in court?

The answer is, first, according to the only theory that will fit the
facts, Van der Lubbe was not an agent provocateur, but a dupe ; second,
according to expert testimony at the trial which can hardly be gainsaid,
there were two fires, not one, in the Reichstag building that night.

Van der Lubbe, a typical enough unfortunate by-product of modern
civilization, was not only weak-minded ; he had a deep grievance against
society and authority, which his feeble brain sought to remedy by
pyromania He was a genuine arsonist. A homeless vagrant, wandering
in the Berlin slums, he set several fires, and in his thick manner boasted
about them. And Nazis heard him. So much is fact.

Entering the Reichstag building, Van der Lubbe ignited his miserable
smudges of tablecloths and curtains, using his shirt for tinder. The
fires, like the acts of arson he had committed on previous days, were not
fires but failures to set fires ; feeble puddles of smoke and soot, nothing
more. He proceeded — ^and must have seen, bursting ahead of him, a
mighty caldron of vivid flame ! This was the other fire. It was the chemi-
cal fire set by the Nazis, who carried their material through the Goering
tunnel, and timed it to go off at just that moment. But Lubbe thought it
was his fire ! He retreated, proud, triumphant — ^and was arrested by the
police.

This was just what the Nazis planned. They wanted a scapegoat —
any kind of scapegoat — so that they could blame the communists. The
link between Lubbe and the Nazis is quite clear. He said in the Berlin
underworld that he was going to burn the Reichstag. It was a matter of
a moment — so honeycombed was Berlin with wSpies, tools, agents — ^for
this information to reach high quarters.

TRICK BY FIRE AND THE PURGE BY BLOOD 49

The Nazis knew that Lubbe was going to be there. But they did not
tell him that they were going to be there. He thought that he was alone.
He never knew the Nazis were acting on his words. Thus his peculiar
behavior in the court. He was proud of his fire; he resented it deeply
when anyone was put forward to share the credit. With impenetrable
obstinacy, he insisted that he had no confederates, and set the fire alone
— and really believed it. This is the only combination of theory and
fact which accounts for all the circumstances of the Reichstag fire. It is
the theory which Dimitrov, when I saw him in Moscow in June, 1935,
accepted as the best explanation of the events.

Explanation?

Karl Ernst, one of those extraordinary characters tossed up from
obscurity to flitting eminence by the turmoil of the Nazi revolution, was
murdered on June 30. He had been a waiter in a homosexual dive in the
west end of Berlin. He was Roehm’s chief prot%e, and consequently
his promotion was very rapid; at the age of twenty-seven he became
Obergruppenfuhrer (a rank corresponding to major-general) of the
Berlin-Brandenburg SA, numbering sixty-five thousand men. Before
June 30, Ernst was aware of impending dissension within the party.
He was afraid that Goering and Himmler were going to oust him. He
wrote a letter, dated June 3, 1934, and sent it abroad, with instructions
that it be published if his fears became true.

This Ernst letter purports to be a full description of the Reichstag
fire plot. It gives a brilliant and terrible picture of the attitude and
manners of the Nazi leaders just before the fire and after. They were
(except for Hitler, who is mentioned reverently only as “He”) vulgar,
lusty, cruel, courageous, and having a marvelous time. They sound like
a group of Capones in politics for the fun of it. And the fire was
plotted almost like a bit of deviltry.

Ernst says that he and Roehm, Goering, Goebbels, Heines and others
met incessantly in the last days of February, 1933, seeking action. Hitler
himself was not privy to their plans. First they considered staging a fake
“assassination of Hitler” ; with this as pretext they could clean up the
country. Goering opposed this as too dangerous — ^though Goebbels ap-
proved it — ^and suggested instead a bomb in the ministry of the interior.
This was given up as impracticable, and Goebbels then suggested firing
the Reichstag, so that the Nazis — ^with satanic appreciation of their jest —
could claim to be “saviors of parliament.” First the room of the com-

INSIDE EUROPE

munist deputies was chosen as the seat of the fire ; then, instead, Goering
thought of using his secret tunnel. Spies in the underworld brought in
news of an arsonist, vaguely ''communist,'' known as Van der Lubbe —
and the thing was done.

Ernst says that he set the actual fire. His comrades were two SA
men, Fiedler and von Mohrenschild.

All three were "executed" in the clean-up of June 30. Dead tongues
tell no tales.

The Ernst letter may not be genuine. Even so, if Ernst didn't set the
fire, someone like him did.

Blood Bath

The events of June 30, 1934, were a historic inevitability. They were
indeed a necessity. Hitler was poised between two mutually exclusive
armies, the Reichswehr (regular army), and the SA, his private Brown
Shirt force, led by Roehm. Events made it imperative for him to give
undisputed authority to one or the other. He chose the Reichswehr. The
SA therefore had to be liquidated. This, in plain language, is the secret
of June 30.

A secondary consideration, almost as important, was the nature of
the Nazi party itself. The party, as Heiden put it, was a unity not of
aims but of causes; it was founded on no coherent body of doctrine;
its personnel was of the most various. The Fuhrer Prinzip was its only
structural bastion, and when sub-leaders became jealous of one another
and thus undermined it, even though Hitler himself was not attacked,
there was nothing to do but eliminate them — ^forcibly.

Third, it is necessary to remember that what began as a terrible ad-
ministration of discipline to Roehm's men degenerated uncontrollably
into a violent situation which leaders seized as a priceless opportunity
to settle old-standing party or private grudges. Admit terror as a prin-
ciple, as Hitler did, and there was no telling where it would end.

The deaths occurred mostly on the night of June 30- July i. Hitler,
in his speech justifying the executions, admitted to seventy-seven slain.
This was certainly an underestimate. The full toll may never be known.
Probably it reached two hundred and fifty, possibly three hundred.

The dead fall into several groups. First, the SA men:

Captain Ernst Roehm, Reichsminister without portfolio and chief of
staff of the SA ; Hitler's best friend ; organizer of his private army.

Karl Ernst, SA Obergruppenfuhrer, Berlin and Brandenburg,

TRICK BY FIRE AND THE PURGE BY BLOOD 51

Three other SA Ohergruppenfuhrers (major-generals), Edmund
Heines, boss of Silesia; August Schneidhuber, police president of
Munich, and Fritz von Krausser.

Hans Hayn, SA Gruppenfuhrer for Saxony, and other Gruppen-
juhrers (brigadier generals).

SA Standartenf'iJirer (colonel) Uhl, named by Hitler as the man ap-
pointed to assassinate him.

SA Standartenfuhrer Count Hans Edwin von Spreti, the boyish
Lustknabe found in bed with Heines.

Second, a ‘Uatholic” group, composed mostly of men close to Vice-
Chancellor von Papen :

Dr. Erich Klausner, leader of the “Catholic Action,"^ an important and
distinguished political leader.

Adelbert Probst, leader of the Catholic Youth movement.

Fritz von Bose, Papen’s state secretary.

Edgar Jung, Papen’s private secretary.

Dr. Beck, of the International Students Exchange.

Third, victims of private or semi-private vengeance :

Gregor Strasser, brilliant theoretician of the Nazi party, formerly
Hitler’s first assistant, in virtual retirement since November, 1932.

Gen. von Kahr, the dictator of Bavaria in 1923, who the Nazis said
“betrayed” the first Hitler Putsch.

Fourth, in a special group:

Gen. Kurt von Schleicher, former chancellor.

Elisabeth von Schleicher, his wife.

Gen. von Bredow, his former assistant in the ministry of war.

Finally, those killed purely by accident, like the Munich music critic,
Willi Schmidt, who was executed by an SS squad despite his protests
that he was not the Willi Schmidt, a Munich SA man, whom it sought.
The proper Willi Schmidt was found and duly shot — Plater.

Former Chancellor von Papen, after his secretaries were killed, barely
escaped with his life, and former Chancellor Pruning would certainly
have been killed, had he not fled the country, against his will and on the
urgent advice of friends, twenty-seven days before. Pruning slipped over
the Dutch frontier partially disguised, in the company of Dutch priests.

Why was Schleicher killed ? Why did these other former chancellors
narrowly escape death ? Because (a) they were former chancellors, and
Brtining and Schleicher were the only two men in Germany who could
conceivably have succeeded Hitler if intrigue of the same kind that

INSIDE EUROPE

brought him to power should presently unseat him; (&) Papen was still
at his own game of palace maneuvers, and had deeply shocked and an-
noyed Nazi extremists by a speech at Marburg on June 17, attacking
them; (c) Bruning was the man who had dared take the Nazi Brown
Shirts ofif the streets, and they never forgave him for it.

Additionally, Schleicher was murdered because Goering hated him
and all Nazis thought him dangerous. The allegation that Schleicher had
intrigued with a foreign power was nonsensical. He was a friend of
Roehm’s, but no evidence has been adduced that he and Roehm were
actually plotting. Schleicher was a great diner-out; he was called the
^‘Social Generar’ and had friends in the foreign embassies ; that was all.

Fellow officers in the Reichswehr deeply resented Schleicher’s murder,
and they demanded that his name be cleared. The Nazis hesitated. The
documents in the case were in the hands of Himmler, the SS chief. The
Reichswehr obtained the documents — ^no one knows how. Himmler tried
to get them back. He failed. A group of four hundred Reichswehr officers
met in a semi-public ceremony, with the old Field-Marshal von Macken-
sen in the chair, and drank a toast to Schleicher's memory, inscribing his
name and that of Bredow in the regimental honor-roll. This frightened
the Nazis, A secret meeting was called by Goering, attended by a handful
of prominent Nazis and all Reichswehr officers above the rank of cap-
tain, at which, it is believed, Goering confessed that Schleicher’s death,
like that of Willi Schmidt, was a “mistake."

Could any “plot" (by talking of a plot, Hitler justified the clean-up)^
have united Roehm, Strasser, Schleicher, von Kahr, Willi Schmidt, Fritz
von Bose, Klausner? The idea is, of course, fantastic. But was Roehm
alone, as boss of the SA, considering subversive action? Most of those
who were in Berlin at the time think not. But it is just possible.

Background to the Killings

Berlin was very tense in May and June, 1934, and economic distress
was sharp. The revolution had taken place, i.e., the Nazis had seized
power. But where were the rewards of victory? Why had not the Nazi

^ German apologists have been hard put to it to explain both the killings and
Hitler^s explanations of them. The most novel excuse I heard came from a highly
nationalist German. Roehm and the others were shot, he said, because the Treaty
of Versailles deprived Germany of colomes Other countries may relegate unpop-
ular or fallen heroes to distant places; for instance Mussolini sent Balbo to Libya
to cool his heels But Germany has no colonial posts available. Roehm might easily
have gone to Tanganyika as administrator. But Tanganyika is no longer German,
and therefore nothing could be done with Roehm except shoot him.

TRICK BY FIRE AND THE PURGE BY BLOOD 53

economic program been converted to reality? The radical Nazis, the rank
and file, the men in the street, felt that Goering and the Reichswehr and
the industrialists had grabbed the plums. They were tense with dissatis-
faction, and they appealed to Hitler — ^in vain. The Leader announced
that no “second revolution” would occur.

Discontent was concentrated, among Nazis, in the SA. The SA con-
sidered itself the chief instrument of the party. It was Hitler’s army
of the streets, that had brought him office; Hitler was a Brown Shirt,
first and last. The S A was the pedestal of the movement ; the submerged
mass and reservoir of man power; it contained many honest Leftists,
eager for the promised land of economic reform.

The SA had swollen to the immense number of 2,500,000 men, and
with the revolution complete there was nothing for them to do. They
were all dressed up — in their nice brown shirts — ^with no place to go.
Hitler, having created a private army, didn’t know what to do with it.
They were a fearsome burden on party finance; they had been replaced
for guard duty by the SS; and they were an ocean of restlessness and
undirected energy.

The leader of the SA was Roehm. He was a remarkable man. He
had the blunt energy of Goering, the sharp ruthlessness of Goebbels,
and an organizing talent like none in Germany. A brusque character, a
man of limited imagination, who hated peace, loved disorder, Roehm
was second only to Hitler in the affection of the Brown Shirts. Hitler
owed more to Roehm than to anybody. Hitler created the SA, but Roehm
was the disciplinarian, the executive. And Hitler loved him.

Roehm’s solution of the SA problem was quite simple. Ambitious, he
wanted to feed the SA into the Reichswehr,^ convert the Reichswehr
into an immense national army, and become head of the armed forces of
the German state Thus he became the personification of two tendencies.
He was (a) the chief of the Leftist tendencies of the regime, since the
SA were the Havenots in Germany, and (b) the competitor of the
Reichswehr for basic authority in the nation.

The Reichswehr naturally opposed him with bitterness and vigor. The
generals, first, had no intention of giving up their jobs to Roehm; sec-
ond, they had built the hundred thousand men of the Reichswehr into
a beautifully precise and tempered military instrument, and would have
committed suicide rather than see it drowned, inundated, with two and

2 He had had this idea as far back as 1922, and went into exile in South America
when he previously split with Hitler on the same issue.

INSIDE EUROPE

a half million hoodlums, clerks, half-trained boys, Lumpen Proletariat
off the streets. Merger with the SA meant death to the Reichswehr. And
the general staff told Hitler so — ^in no uncertain terms.

The Leader sought about him warily. He hated to give up Roehm;
but on the other hand the hundred thousand men of the Reichswehr
were infinitely more valuable to him than the 2,500,000 virtually un-
armed SA. Assiduously he had cultivated the Reichswehr higher officers,
especially General von Blomberg, who was minister of defense. Blom-
berg, an important point, became deeply devoted to Hitler. Actually on
June 29, the day before the clean-up, Blomberg in a significant speech
expressed his contentment with the Nazi regime. This was enough for
Hitler. If he could be absolutely sure of the Reichswehr, the most pow-
erful force in Germany, the SA lost its raison d^etre.

Hitler called Roehm to see him. They talked five hours. Roehm asked
him once more to enlarge the Reichswehr by inclusion of the SA. Hitler
told him that the general staff of the Reichswehr insisted on selective
recruiting, when and if conscription was introduced. Roehm departed,
beaten. Sulking, he went to Munich. It was announced that, beginning
July I, the SA would take two months’ leave, during which period they
were not to wear uniforms. The SA off the streets! The revolution
betrayed I

At this point should be mentioned another factor. We have not till
now discussed the SS. These, the Schutzstaffel, were the Black Shirts,
about three hundred thousand strong. They were the Hite of the fighting
forces of the party, founded originally as a bodyguard to Hitler and the
other leaders. The SA was a mob. The SS was a pretorian guard, smart,
well-fed, armed. The SA was loyal to Roehm. The SS, with which Roehm
had nothing to do, was loyal to Hitler. The boss of the SS was a man
who hated Roehm, Himmler. And Hitler could count on the SS ab-
solutely.

The Reichswehr was sufficiently alarmed by this crisis to undertake
unusual precautions. For ten days before the clean-up, Reichswehr staff
officers in Berlin carried service revolvers, keeping them at hip even in
their offices. A Reichswehr regiment was mobilized at Doebritz, near
Berlin. This followed rumors — ^apparently without substantiation — ^that
Karl Ernst, the most devoted of Roehm’s followers, intended to defy
the SA dispersal order and occupy Berlin. It was even said that Ernst
intended murdering the general staff 1

Precautions by the Reichswehr do not prove the existence of a plot.

TRICK BY FIRE AND THE PURGE BY BLOOD SS

It is even possible that the Reichswehr, to serve its own ends, might
have invented a plot, so as to be rid of Roehm. Certainly young Ernst
seemed remarkably innocent of any political intentions, let alone mutiny.
He had recently married and he was arrested en route to Bremen, where
he was boarding ship for a postponed honeymoon in Madeira. Hitler
had been best man at his wedding, not six weeks before.

Spake the Grisly Terror^'

Possibly to allay suspicions by Roehm that he was aware of treason,
if any existed. Hitler left for south Germany to inspect a labor camp.
He took Goebbels with him, and also a man named Lutze, who when
Roehm was dead was promptly named new SA chief of staff. Goering
had been charged with the clean-up in Berlin. That was why Goebbels
was with Hitler. Goering, running wild, might have killed Goebbels. In
the middle of the night (June 29), Hitler records that he heard news
of '"such serious character'’ that he must take action at once.

Goebbels had described the occasion picturesquely:

'T still see the Leader standing on the terrace of the Godesberg Hotel.
The Leader looks seriously into the dark sky. Nobody knows yet what
threatens. The Leader is true to his own principles. The Leader is full
of determination regarding the reactionary rebels who have cast the na-
tion into unlimited disturbance.

^'Reports come to him from Berlin and Munich. After only a few
minutes' conference, the decision is made not to wait until the next
morning. We start at two in the night. At four we are in Munich.

‘‘On the aerodrome the Leader receives reports. Then he decides to
go into the lions' den. He rushes by car to Wiessee. Without resistance
he manages to get into the house of Roehm. With incomparable courage
Hitler carries out the arrests. Soon after the arrest of Roehm his staff
arrives from Munich. Hitler confronts them and tells them in one sen-
tence to go back to Munich. They obey."

{Manchester Guardian, July 2, 1934.)

Now, if Roehm was planning an outbreak in Munich on the 30th, why
was he in bed at Wiessee, twenty miles away, at six A M. of the morning
that the action was alleged to have begun? Why, if Munich was rising
in revolt, was it quite peaceable when Hitler, the same morning, arrived
there ?

An official Nazi communique describes the raid at Wiessee in more
detail ;

INSIDE EUROPE

The Fiihrer entered, and in person arrested Chief of Staff Roehm,
who yielded ^‘silently and without resistance’" in his bedroom. In Heines’s
room immediately opposite “a shameful picture” met the Fuhrer. Heines
was in bed with a youth ; the repulsive scene which accompanied their
arrest cannot be described. It pitilessly reveals the conditions reigning in
the circles around the former Chief of Staff.

(London Times^ July 2, 1934.)

The unofficial story is that Hitler, far from being alone, was accom-
panied by a squadron of SS gunmen, and that Roehm, far from accepting
arrest silently, bawled insults at the Leader, denouncing him as a traitor
to the revolution, and that Hitler shouted in return until the SS men
took Roehm away.

Roehm was brought into Munich. Heines and his Lustknahe were ap-
parently dispatched on the spot. Hitler did not know what to do with
Roehm. The chief of staff was clapped in prison and told to shoot him-
self. He refused, saying that if anyone shot him, it would have to be
‘‘Adolf himself.” He was not killed till five P.M. the next day, about
thirty-six hours after his arrest. No one knows the precise circumstances.
Probably the jailers came to Hitler again and again, with the words,
“He won’t kill himself. . . . What shall we do . . . ?’' And one can
imagine Hitler’s final, irritated, desperate order to get rid somehow of
the man who was his only friend, get him out of the way, shoot him,
kill him. . . .

The others did not matter to Hitler so much — ^personally. There were
plenty of others. He made a clean sweep of the allegedly disaffected SA
leaders in Munich and the vicinity. Then early in the morning he ap-
parently sent Goering a message to go ahead in Berlin, Goering waited
till about eleven A.M. before cutting loose. Then he commenced action,
“expanding the original scope of his instructions,” as he admitted later.

It is a moot point whether Goering had talked over with Hitler those
whom he wished to kill. Possibly not. Hitler’s “executive” orders were
often extremely vague.^ At any rate the death squads got to work.
Himmler superintended them. Annihilation, quick and terrible, began.

Schleicher was shot in his home. He was completely unaware that any
action against him impended. He was, in fact, talking to a friend on the
phone when the SS men arrived. He said into the phone, “Excuse me

® The story goes that Hitler, some months later, was asked by a foreigner the
whereabouts of a friend. A Nazi at the luncheon table stammered explanation that
he had “disappeared on June 30.” Hitler paled, not knowing the man was dead.

TRICK BY FIRE AND THE PURGE BY BLOOD 57

just a moment ; someone is in the room.” He turned and saw his execu-
tioners. They opened fire. Frau von Schleicher, hearing the shots, rushed
into the room. She was killed so that there would be no witness to her
husband’s death.

The SS men were divided into two groups. Those who did the shoot-
ing were full-time veterans, members of Hitler’s Leibstandarten (body-
guard). The executions, as apart from downright assassinations, took
place in the Lichterfelde barracks. The culprits were given a one-minute
‘'trial” before a drum-head court martial. The procedure in most cases
was simply a statement by the officer in charge, “You are accused of
treachery and condemned to death.” As each man was brought out to
face the firing squad, a blinding searchlight was turned into his eyes
and drums rolled. Then the volley.

Several of the condemned SA leaders, including Sander, Ernst’s chief
of staff, were shot with “Heil Hitler” on their lips. They thought that
a mutinous group of SS men had revolted against Hitler and that they
were dying loyal to the Fuhrer and the Nazi movement! “Traitors,”
indeed.

It took Hitler from July i to July 13 to recover his shaken nerve.
At first the announcement was made that only a few ranking SA leaders
and General von Schleicher and his wife had been killed. Fearing that
the plot theory would not receive credence, the propaganda ministry also
called attention to the homosexual character of Roehm, Heines, and their
closest friends. The party had always been split on the homosexual issue.
Hitler spoke on July 13 and tolled off the names of the seventy-seven
whom he admitted to be dead. He looked like a broken man. The first
part of his speech was received in almost complete silence, though Nazi
deputies (some thirty seats were significantly vacant) were the audience.

In great detail, according to habit. Hitler first sketched the history
of the Nazi revolution. Then he recounted his differences with Roehm.
About details of the “plot” he was far from precise. Referring to
Schleicher’s alleged meeting with a foreign diplomat, he made the re-
markable statement that if “German traitors met a foreign statesman
and gave strict orders to conceal it from me, I will have such men shot,
no matter whether this clandestine discussion had been devoted only to
the weather, old coins, and the like.” Then he concluded with his pas-
sionate outburst that for twenty-four hours he had been supreme court
of the German people — ^and the audience broke into wild applause.

INSIDE EUROPE

Modern Monte Cristo

As extraordinary as some of the murders on June 30 were some of
the escapes. Take the case of Gottfried Treviranus. He had been a sub-
marine commander during the war and as a cabinet minister under
Briining had taken a nationalist point of view almost as strong as that
of the Nazis. But he was on the death list for several reasons-* (i) he
was Bruning's closest friend, (2) he was a strong influence in the
fighting services, (3) he had always despised Hitler and never con-
cealed it.

On June 30, just after lunch, Treviranus was playing tennis in his
back yard. A lorry containing a dozen SS men, with drawn revolvers,
ground to a stop athwart his house. One of his children met them and
they shouted ''Where is Treviranus?’’ A voice from upstairs, attracted
by the commotion, called "Here I am.” But this was Treviranus’ father !
Rushing upstairs the SS men saw him, realized their mistake, and asked
where his son was. Meanwhile the child ran out and told Treviranus, in
the tennis court, what was happening. Instantly he jumped the garden
wall and leaped into his car, parked outside. The SS men, now down-
stairs, saw him drive off, shot at him and missed.

Very intelligently Treviranus drove straight into town instead of try-
ing to get into the country; the truck full of SS men followed him but
could not shoot on account of the heavy traffic, then lost him. Treviranus
stopped at the home of a friend and borrowed street clothes. He then
went to Schleicher’s house to find out what was happening. There was
a crowd outside. He got out of his car and asked an SS guard what had
occurred. Hearing that Schleicher had been shot, with considerable
alacrity but outward calm Treviranus jumped back into his car and
drove into the country, where he smashed the car against the edge of
the road, to give the impression he had sought further escape into the
fields. He returned to inner Berlin by taxi and took refuge in the house
of a friend, where — ^incredible detail — ^he kept cool by reading Macaulay’s
"History of England.”

End oj Hindenburg

On August 2, Hindenburg died. The bloodshed on June 30 may have
had some percussion on his aged frame; on the other hand the Old
Man seemed to have been well satisfied with Hitler and Goering, be-
cause he sent telegrams of congratulation to each.

TRICK BY FIRE AND THE PURGE BY BLOOD 59

Even the day before his death the most competent of Berlin corre-
spondents and diplomats considered that the event must be a crisis of
the gravest sort for Hitler. Who would be President? Could he appoint
himself President? If he did so, who would become Chancellor? Above
all, what would the Reichswehr do?

Now, with better perspective, we know that Hitler had bought off
the army on June 30. Even so, wise after the event, one is bound to be
impressed at Hitler’s cleverness and daring. No one at the time dreamed
of the simple and subtle scheme long up Hitler’s sleeve, of combining
the office of President and Chancellor.

As to the Reichswehr, Blomberg took care of that. The very morning
of Hindenburg’s death, all Reichswehr garrisons in Germany took a new
oath, and one of the most extraordinary in military history. Usually
armies swear allegiance to the crown or head of state. This was an oath
of fidelity, and a thorough one, to Hitler personally ;

*T swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional
obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler,
the Commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht (armed forces) and that I
will, as a valiant soldier, at all times be ready to stake my life for this
oath.”

Each soldier and minor officer swore the oath two words at a time,
repeating them after the commandant, with hand upraised. Some officers,
hating Hitler, took sick leave that day. The general staff was not per-
turbed. Each absent officer was forced to take the oath personally on
his return to service. . . . After the oath all sang not only Deutschland
tJber Alles, but the Horst Wessel song, which is the Nazi anthem.

As long as Hindenburg lived, there was some possibility, although it
was remote, that he might dismiss Hitler from the chancellorship. With
his death this possibility passed. Hitler was now Head of State. He could
only dismiss himself. His undeviating path had reached its natural end.
Only God could remove him now. And God, he claimed, was on his side.

Chapter V

The Two G-Men

Be my brother, or I will hash your head in,

— ^German Proverb

S URROUNDING Hitler is a fantastic congeries of sub-Hitlers. In
the early days in Berlin I heard one of the shrewdest observers of
German affairs say: "'No top Nazi is perfectly normal or perfectly
sincere. They are either cynics, on-the-make, or hysterics.’’ Every na-
tional revolution, it is true, convulsively stirring the depths of a great
nation, may bring strange fish to the surface. And I do not say that
hundreds and thousands of decent Germans, some of them in important
administrative posts, are not forthright and honest men.

Several of the more notorious misfits perished on June 30. Plenty
remain. It is not only that they remain, but they hold jobs extraordinarily
appropriate to their weakness and failings. Who should be director of
"'popular enlightenment” in the Third Reich? Who, indeed, but Dr.
Goebbels, whose power of enlightenment is that of a cripple, a man
maimed and dwarfed, with malignant envy of those physically fit. Who
should have almost supreme police power over eighty million Germans ?
Who, indeed, but General Goering, a man of the most violent and un-
stable passions, an ex-morphiniac ? Who, to choose a minor instance,
should be, of all things, minister of education for the Reich? Who, if
it must be told, but Dr. Bernhard Rust, who some years ago lost his
teacher’s job — ^because he was incompetent!

Hitler once told an interviewer that he did not like Yes-men. Delib-
erately he chose to surround himself with bold and blustering spirits
who often disagreed among themselves. He has, in fact, made a definite
policy of playing one sub-leader against another; he keeps them guess-
ing, gets out of each his best. Also, it is believed, he has something "on”
most of them in his dossiers. The leaders, jealous of each other, and
knowing Hitler the all-powerful arbiter of their destinies, compete with
one another for his favor.

Hitler takes good care that none of the sub-leaders approach his own

THE TWO G-MEN

supremacy. When Goering got too powerful, he took the secret police
away and gave them to Himmler.

Party posts more or less correspond to posts in the government. Dr,
Goebbels, for instance, is Reichsleiter for propaganda in the party and
also Reich's propaganda minister ; Darre is party leader for agriculture,
and also minister of agriculture. If party and state were perfectly co-
ordinated, as in Russia, this correspondence of posts would be complete.
But it is by no means complete. Dr. Schacht, for instance, for a long time
had no party rank at all, though he was economic minister. And whereas
Rosenberg is party chief for foreign affairs, he is very far from being
foreign minister in the government, which is Ribbentrop's job.

Germany is divided into a series of party districts or Gaus. Dr. Goeb-
bels is Gauleiter for Berlin. When the Gauleiter is also the SA leader of
the district, a condition which Hitler seeks to prevent as far as possible,
he becomes a personage of enormous local power. Heines was both
Gauleiter and SA commander in Silesia. Julius Streicher, the worst of
the anti-Semites, is both Gauleiter and SA leader in North Bavaria.

The rivalries between these men are formidable. That between Goering
and Goebbels is the best known. That between Goebbels and Rosenberg
is no less vicious. It would be a complex task to draw a chart of the
mutual hatreds within the party. Goebbels and Schacht are far from
being friends; Goering and Ribbentrop; Goebbels and Himmler; and
everyone dislikes Rosenberg. The only two men on fairly good terms
with everyone are Hess and Frick ; neither is ambitious, and both have
pleasant personalities.

This unnatural melange of hatreds produces friction and discordance
and also inefficiency. Beyond that, it indicates a serious weakness of
Hitlerism. The party, founded on emotion, based on no fixed and stable
ideology, held together only by the Leader Principle, is not indissolubly
part of the structure of government and society, as is Fascism in Italy or
communism in Russia. Hitler’s three principal advisers for years were not
Nazis at all: Schacht, Neurath, and General Blomberg. Imagine a
Soviet Government in which the ministers of economics, foreign affairs,
and war were not communists !

There are these sub-Hitlers then. Let us begin with Marshal Goering.

Public Clothes-horse No. i

"Adolf Hitler is the greatest German of all time.”

— ^Marshal Goering.

Though he stands above all for the entity of Prussia — ^his great air
force aside — ^the eustv Goering is a Bavarian ; he was born in Rosenheim,

INSIDE EUROPE

Bavaria, on January 12, 1893. He came of a good family — ^his father was
governor-general of German South-West Africa — ^and his schooling was
good. He spent his holidays climbing the Austrian Alps. He too, like
Hitler, has strong emotional affiliations with Austria, and this may be
one of the contributory factors accounting for the Nazi assault on Austria
in 1933 and 1934. Goering’s brother lives in Vienna. And his two sisters
married Austrians.

At twenty-one, Goering enlisted in the German Air Force. By the
autumn of 1915 he was leader of No. 5 Pursuit Squadron. He was
awarded the highest German decoration, the Pour le Merit e (equivalent
to the Victoria Cross), and in 1918 he succeeded to the command of the
celebrated Richthofen Squadron. He shot down twenty-three planes
during the war, as against fifty-four for Udet, the second German pilot,
and eighty-odd for Richthofen.

The two incidents which contributed most deeply to the motivation of
his life came in 1918, just after the Armistice. First, Goering refused
to mobilize and surrender his planes. He was ordered to do so by the
German General Staff, but he refused to obey, until he was finally
brought to ground near Darmstadt. He said farewell to his fellow officers,
toasting the day when Germany would be supreme in the air. His planes
were then destroyed.

He never got over this. The destruction of his precious aircraft, by
men whom he considered his infinite inferiors, was a psychic shock
from which he did not recover ; his present passionate energy to build a
new German air fleet is compensation.

Second, after he had returned to Berlin, a socialist mob saw him in
uniform and forcibly tore his officer’s insignia from his coat lapels.
Foaming with rage, he swore vengeance. His hatred of socialists, which
is psychopathic in intensity, dates from that day. This incident is im-
portant to Nazi history. It is not entirely fanciful to assume that much of
the Brown Terror was motivated by this incident.

Goering went to Sweden in 1919 and got a job as a commercial flyer.
At this time his morphia history began. He no longer takes drugs, but
for some years he was an addict. In Sweden he fell in love with a woman
who profoundly influenced his life, his first wife, Baroness Karin Fock,
He met her, in almost Wagnerian fashion, after a forced landing on her
estate at Rockelstad, in North Sweden.

He was severely wounded in the Munich beer-hall Putsch of 1923,
having become one of Hitler’s leading followers the year before. He

THE TWO G-MEN 63

escaped to Italy and then returned to Sweden. His health broke down ;
first he went to a hospital in Konradsberg, and then on to an asylum,
Langbro. His wife meanwhile had contracted tuberculosis. The Swedish
courts refused to give the Goerings custody of a child by his wife’s first
marriage.

Frau Goering died in 1932, just before her husband became President
of the Reichstag, his first big job. Thereafter, when Gregor Strasser
was disgraced, Goering succeeded to much of his influence with Hitler
and the party. At this time memory of the dead Karin seemed the most
important personal factor in his life. He brought her body to Germany
(she had died in Sweden) and built a sort of shrine in his Berlin home,
where her portrait stood between lighted candles and tinted by reflec-
tions from a stained-glass window built into the wall. There Goering
knelt daily and prayed — ^until he met Frau Emmy Sonnemann.

This massive lady, an actress, won his favor and he conventionalized
their private relations in a gargantuan wedding which took place in
Berlin in April, 1935. The ceremony was practically a Roman feast.
Hitler was best man. The newly-weds got $400,000 worth of wedding
gifts. The festivities began with the execution on the same day of two
communists, Epstein and Ziegler, who had been condemned to death on
the charge of complicity in the murder of the Nazi hero, Horst Wessel.
Many Nazis admired the S3unbolic inference — a blood sacrifice to pro-
pitiate fertility in the married couple. The Goerings, incidentally, called
their first daughter Edda, after Edda Mussolini.

Goering holds an imposing galaxy of jobs. He is President of the
Reichstag, General of Reichswehr, General of Police, Reichsminister
of Aviation, Prime Minister of Prussia,^ Master of the Hunt, Chief
Forester of the Reich, and Director of Television — ^this last because tele-
vision may be applicable to aerial warfare. In 1936 he became superin-
tendent of the German ‘Tour-Year” plan and as such the nominal eco-
nomics dictator. Above all, he is Marshal of the Air Force. It is Goering
who built and runs Germany’s terrific air fleet.

He is famous for the variety and flamboyance of his uniforms, but
legend has got the better of fact, and in reality he wears only about
a dozen. Usually he carries a hilted sword, like that of a crusader. Behind
the desk in his principal residence, a colossal headman’s sword is sus-

^ But he won't cross the threshold of the Prussian Ministry because it was for-
merly the stronghold of the socialists.

INSIDE EUROPE

oended perpendicularly on a velvet curtain. He has a mania for display
not only in dress but houses.

Mostly he lives in a large structure on Leipzigerplatz. A sizable swas-
tika is designed in tile above the main fireplace. In one room the wall-
paper is said to be blood-red and the carpet pitch-black; a marble bust
■)i Hitler stands on a pedestal, illumined by a spotlight. Another room,
m immense and richly-decorated hall, may be transformed into a movie
■heater ; at the touch of a button the tapestry on the wall rises into the
eiling, disclosing a movie screen.

In Bavaria Goering has a country house, near Hitler’s chalet, on a
five-thousand-acre estate presented to him by the local government. His
most ambitious project, and the one dearest to him, is the tremendous
air ministry in Berlin, with two thousand five hundred rooms, so big
that airplanes can land and take off from the roof.

His ambition as well as his vanity is enormous. On March 6, 1933,
exactly one day after the elections which confirmed Hitler’s accession
to office, he ordered his portrait painted — ^with a book in his lap con-
spicuously entitled Life of Napoleon, His pets are lion cubs. All of them,
male or female, are named Csesar.

He is as carnivorous as Hitler is frugal — ^brusque, impulsive, cruel.
Testimony after the Munich Putsch of 1923 recorded his orders to '‘beat
in the skulls” of his opponents ‘‘with rifle butts” (Heil, p. 19). His
famous order to the police in February, 1933, to shoot ‘‘enemies” with-
out question, really signaled the beginning of the Nazi terror. His ruth-
lessness is unthinking, spasmodic, hot-blooded. He is not a plotter like
Goebbels. He has great executive ability, and this serves to make him
doubly dangerous. He knows how to listen. He gets things done. Oddly
enough, he has great charm — ^when he wishes to be charming.

Since Goering came to symbolize the police power of the Third Reich,
12,863 people have been sterilized, some of them forcibly. Several hundred
thousand Jews have been forced out of the country. In the year between
June, 1933, and June, 1934, 212 men and women were beheaded out of
214 sentenced to death, the great majority for political offenses which
in no other country would entail the capital penalty. Goering himself
decreed that the sentences should be executed by the medieval ax, instead
of the guillotine. The number of persons sentenced to imprisonment was
280,308; they were to serve an aggregate of 129,421 years. In addition,
184 persons were shot “while attempting to escape,” 13,000 were de-
prived of citizenship, and 49,000 sent to concentration camps.

THE TWO G-MEN

Goering is a good Aryan. For instance, he greeted the conclusion of
the Anglo-German naval agreement of June, 1935, as ‘'a victory for race
law.” But he is the only leading Nazi who is not an outspoken anti-
Semite. As to economic affairs, he is with the Rightists in the party. He
cared nothing for the ''socialist” part of Hitler’s program. He became a
Nazi because Naziism meant a strong national Germany with a new
army and a powerful air force.

The jokes about Goering are, of course, legion. Most of them are
predicated either on the resplendency of his uniforms or his abnormal
size. He is not merely fat: he is fat atop an immensity of muscle. He
moves with the vigor of a man a hundred pounds lighter : there is nothing
torpid about him; his energy is terrific. But the story goes that he is
so obese that he “sits down on his own stomach” ; he and Emmy have
to sleep in a huge tent : and he wears “corsets on his thighs.”

One story is that he dons an admiral’s uniform whenever he takes a
bath, with rubber duplicates to all his medals. A new unit of weight has
been established in Germany — a. “goering” — to signify the aggregate
displacement of his decorations. Once he visited a steel factory and his
companions were horrified to see him suddenly leave the floor and move
horizontally upward to the ceiling. Reason : an electro-magnet above had
caught his medals.

Another little story has him arriving late at a luncheon in Berlin,
where he is to meet an eminent (and doubtless mythical) visiting Eng-
lishman. Goering apologizes for his tardiness, and says that he has been
out shooting. The Englishman turns to him with the lofty words, “Ani-
mals, I presume?” Goering, incidentally, is said to be fond himself of
all the stories about him.

Once, the legend has it, Hitler fell into a doze during a performance
of Lohengrin. The Fuhrer was too tired to keep fully awake. His eyes
opened suddenly as the figure of the shining knight in armor took the
stage. Hitler thought it was Goering. “Hermann,” he shouted, “you are
going too far.”

Goering’s basic importance, now that war has come, is not his blood
lust, not his position in Prussia, not his command of the Prussian police.
What matters is his association with aviation. At the beginning at least
the war was largely fought in the air, and Goering, with his immense
drive and ruthlessness, was directing it on the German side. His work
helped make the dazzling Polish campaign possible.

As befits his character, the general can use doughty language on oc-

INSIDE EUROPE

casion. '^Anyone who writes against Germany/’ he has said, “must have
dung in his brains.” He is exceptionally forthright. When he first met
Mussolini he smiled and said, “The last time I was in Italy I bombed
Verona.”

The Doctor

“A Jew is for me an object of physical disgust. I vomit when I see one . . .
Christ cannot possibly have been a Jew. I don't have to prove that scientifically.
It IS a fact. ... I treasure an ordinary prostitute above a married Jewess ”

— Dr. Goebbels

Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels was born with a club foot. This was the
most important event in his life. It explains much of his personality
and career Crippled, as Heiden puts it, “a dwarf among giants,” he
had to make his way by skill, cleverness, by conspiracy. When his class-
mates went away to war — ^he was born in the Rhineland in 1897 — ^he
had to stay at home on account of his deformity. His crippled foot
sharpened his ambition, and also his hatred of the healthy. He is the most
virulent man in the party — ^and the best educated. He took his PhD.
at Heidelberg. The doctorate, alleged often to be spurious, is quite
genuine.

The Goebbels family was devoutly Roman Catholic, but he is a fero-
cious anti-clerical. His father was a teacher, the grandfather a peasant ;
his mother’s family were handicraft workers, and all were poor. He
worked his way to a scholarship at Heidelberg, after attending several
other schools. As a youth he wanted to be a literary figure, and indeed
he has written much : his published works fill fourteen volumes.

His wife, who married him after divorcing her first husband, was
an important influence in his career. Enemies said that the first husband
was Jewish; this was not true — ^he was a quite Aryan lawyer named
Quandt; but as a child Frau Goebbels was brought up in a Jewish
family. Hitler liked Frau Goebbels and, in the first years of his chan-
cellorship, went often to her musical parties. This was highly advan-
tageous to the political plans of the little doctor. For a time Frau
Goebbels was director of the Deutsche Moden-Amt, a sort of fashion
ministry supposed to create truly Aryan styles for German women ; but
it didn’t last long.

The little doctor — ^he is scarcely five feet five inches — entered a meet-
ing-hall in Munich in 1922; the speaker was Adolf Hitler. Goebbels
says that pure chance brought him there. Converted instantly to Naziism,

THE TWO G-MEN

he went to the Rhineland to organize party groups. Hitler soon came to
appreciate his quick tongue, his soaring words; next to the Leader he
became the most valuable orator in the movement. In 1926 Hitler sent
him to organize the party in Berlin, where it had made comparatively
little progress. Goebbels founded a newspaper, the Angriff, and inside
four years, by great feats of journalistic and organizational skill, he
was leader of a powerful machine: next to Munich Berlin became the
chief stronghold of the Hitlerites.

Goebbels's violence in oratory and journalism exceeded that of anyone
in Germany. He was completely reckless and vindictive. At one time
there were one hundred and twenty-six libel suits pending against him.
Once, long ago, he printed a headline in the Angriff, IS HINDEN-
BURG STILL ALIVE? The President brought suit for libel and col-
lected eight hundred marks damages. Retaliating, Goebbels wrote that
Hindenburg was surrounded ‘^by Jews and Marxists.’’ {Time, August

13, 1934.)

At the end of 1939 Goebbels was still Reichsminister of Propaganda
and Public Enlightenment. As such he was undisputed ruler of the Press
in Germany and, something almost as important, ruler of the radio. He
likewise controlled the theater and the cinema, as well as most musical,
artistic, cultural, and even scientific activities; he made the Reich a
cultural prison, a Nazi vacuum, a country in a mental strait- jacket, for
eighty million Germans.

Goebbels is also stage manager to the Nazi party. He invented the
technique of the great mass meetings which helped so cardinally to bring
Hitler votes. His tactics were simple. ‘‘Propaganda has only one object,”
he wrote, “to conquer the masses. Every means that furthers this aim
is good ; every means that hinders it is bad.” He planned the strategy
of incessant and unremitting attack. Thus the flaming decorations, the
loud-speakers, the careful “build-up” for Hitler’s appearance, the march-
ing, the uniforms.

Then, when Hitler was chancellor, he engineered the first incredible
mob displays which so vehemently aroused the Nazis. He suggested the
burning of the books; he organized the May Day and Harvest festi-
vals; he superintended the Winterhilje relief campaign. His supreme
achievement was, however, the creation of the Horst Wessel legend. Out
of a procurer he made a hero.

The youthful bravo named Horst Wessel, son of a Lutheran pastor,
was one of the many rowdies who disfigured the Berlin streets before

INSIDE EUROPE

itler came to power. He became an SA troop commander, active in
rgely communist districts, and the communists hated him. Three hooli-
ins, moved by personal as well as political reasons, went up to his room
tid shot him as he lay in bed. He refused to have a Jewish doctor who
^as summoned, and died of his wounds.

Goebbels saw in Horst Wessel’s funeral a perfect opportunity for
ig-time propaganda. But the police (this was way back in 1930) re-
used to permit an expansive demonstration. So Goebbels had to think
i something else. Horst Wessel had written words to a street song,
)ased on an old Bavarian tune, which was sung by Nazis and com-
nunists both. Goebbels decided to make capital of this song ; and a good
ousing tune it indeed is. Before a month had passed, the song was the
inofficial Nazi hymn. Soon it was official. And Horst Wessel became,
md still is, the No. i Nazi martyr.

Outwardly relations between Goebbels and Goering are correct, but
they seldom miss the opportunity for surreptitious digs at one another.
Goering, as Prime Minister of Prussia, ruled the Staatsopcr in Berlin.
So Goebbels, undaunted, organized another opera in Berlin as a rival
to Goering's opera. Goebbels is very jealous of his prerogatives. Putzi
Hanfstaengl, late in 1933, was charged with the preparation of a film
depicting the life of Horst Wessel. Goebbels succeeded first in tem-
porarily banning the film, then in having its treatment altered and title
changed, even though it was able Nazi propaganda as it stood.

Some Goebbels obiter dicta :

'T know it is a sacrifice for us not to have a new war.^'

'"Our Brown Shirts saved France from Bolshevism, and even now
with its Stavisky scandal and Paris street riots, things are not in order
there.”

“Hitler's attack on the democratic spirit is merely the opening act of
a development the end of which will be a National Socialist Europe.”

“War is the most simple affirmation of life. Suppress war, and it would
be like trying to suppress the processes of nature.”

“Germany marches with Hitler's Mem Kampj in one hand and the
sword in the other. Book and sword shall be the symbols of our national
life.”

Control the Press of a nation and half the job of dictatorship is done.
Goebbels has given living strength to the authority of this maxim. As
supreme dictator of the printed word in the Third Reich, nothing may
be published in Germany without his consent. He is at liberty to censor
even the words of fellow cabinet ministers. In June, 1934, he prevented
full mihlication of Papen's Marburg speech; in August, 1935, he censored

THE TWO G-MEN

Dr. Schacht’s similar warning to extremists at Konigsberg ; in the same
month he forbade the broadcasting of Streicher's Jew-baiting rally in
Berlin. No journalist may find employment in Germany till Dr. Goebbels
certifies his acceptability; no newspaper may publish an3^hing without
his consent. Incidental result: 1,400 German newspapers, about one-third
of the total number in the Reich, have perished since 1933.

Goebbels has kept his footing partly because Hitler needs him, partly
because of his supernal shrewdness. His nose is sharp, and his instinct
for self-preservation immense. Any time crisis brews, as on June 30,
Goebbels will be found on Hitler's shadow. He flatters those who, he
thinks, are of use to him ; he never says anything against those who at
the moment are powerful ; and he never kicks a man until he is down.

Dr. Goebbels is the spiritual source of such a medley of violent non-
sense as the modern world has seldom seen. For instance listen to Pro-
fessor Herman Gauch, author of the Nazi tract, New Bases of Racial
Research :

“In non-Nordics, the teeth, corresponding to the snout-like narrow-
ness of the upper jaw, stand at a more oblique angle than in animals.
The grinding motion of chewing in Nordics allows mastication to take
place with the mouth closed, whereas men of other races are inclined to
make the same smacking noise as animals. . . .

“The Nordic mouth has further superiorities. Just as the color red
has a stirring effect, the bright red mouth of Nordics attracts and pro-
vokes kisses and courtship The Nordic mouth is kiss-capable. On the
other hand, the non-Nordic's broad, thick-lipped mouth together with
his wide-dilated nostrils displays sensual eagerness, a false and malicious
sneering expression and a dipping movement indicative of voluptuous
self-indulgence.

“Talking with the aid of hands and feet is characteristic of non-
Nordics, whereas the Nordic man stands calmly, often enough with his
hands in his pockets.

“Generally speaking, the Nordic race alone can emit sounds of un-
troubled clearness, whereas among non-Nordics the pronunciation is
impure, the individual sounds are more confused and like the noises
made by animals, such as barking, smffing, snoring, squeaking.

“If non-Nordics are more closely allied to monkeys and. apes than
to Nordics, why is it possible for them to mate with Nordics and not
with apes? The answer is this. It has not been proved that non-Nordics
cannot mate with apes."

No detail is too small for Dr. Goebbel's men. For instance, this attack
on the alien lemon :

“Farewell lemon, we need thee not! Our German rhubarb will take
thy place fully and entirely. He is so unpretending that we overlooked

INSIDE EUROPE

and despised him, busy with infatuation for foreign things. In all our
shires we can have him in masses, the whole year round. We get him
almost for nothing; his tartness will season our salads and vegetable
dishes. Slightly sweetened he provides us with delicious refreshment,
and, what is more, he is a blood-purifymg and medicinal agent true to
German t3^e. Let us make good with German rhubarb the sins we have
committed with the alien lemon.”

(London Times, July 29, 1935.)

But it is unspeakable tragedy rather than racial or citric nonsense
that Goebbels, above all, stands for. He is the organizer of the worst
excesses of Nazi anti-Semitism.

When Austria fell to Germany, three hundred thousand Austrian
Jews fell to the Nazis. A series of drastic measures thereupon imple-
mented the Nuremberg laws. Jews were barred from being real estate
agents, traveling salesmen, or accountants ; they were forbidden to enter
the stock exchange or visit their safety deposit vaults — ^if any — ^without
police escort. Landlords had to expel Jewish doctors, and in most cities
Jews could not live in apartments facing main streets. Jews were excluded
from state schools and universities, from park benches, from bathing
beaches, even from shops at certain hours. Jewish children in particular
suffered revolting tortures. One law obliged every Jew to adopt the
name Sarah or Israel, and Jews were restricted in future to a short list
of given names. This list, incidentally, did not include Mary. Nor did it
include Joseph or Paul — which are Dr. Goebbels^s own given names.

In November, 1938 came the shooting of the German diplomat vom
Rath by the Jewish boy Herschel Gr3mszpan. Again terrible outrages
against Jews occurred. The Jews were barred from all economic activity
in the Reich, and at the same time collectively fined one thousand mil-
lion marks. They were ordered to make good all the damage done by
the rioting Nazis, damage estimated at some 13,000,000 marks ; meantime
their insurance claims were canceled. In February, 1939 all Jews in
Germany were ordered to give up their jewelry and similar valuables.
Later — strange detail — ^they were forbidden to own carrier pigeons !

Goebbels is not a Jew, but his appearance is un- Aryan, to say the
least. His enemies in the party have often pointedly but in circumlocu-
tory fashion referred to the dangerous racial aspects of lame or deformed
men, those with club feet in particular. Goebbels^s reply was a minor
masterpiece. He found an anthropologist who invented a classification in
Ar5ran ethnology to apply to himself alone — Nachgedunkelter Schrumpf--
germane. This is hard to translate. An approximate rendition : ^^A dwarf-
like German who grew dark.”

Chapter VI

The Other Little Hitlers

We interpret treaties as we think right. We do not submit to
the judgment oj others,

— ^Adolf Hitler

The methods by which a people forces its way upward are of
no moment. Only the goal is important,

— ^Dr. Goebbels

The Perfect Bureaucrat — Frick

I ESS publicized than either, Dr. Wilhelm Frick is, after Goering and
^ Goebbels, the most powerful Nazi officeholder. He was appointed
minister of the interior for the Reich in Hitler's first cabinet, and he
has held this office ever since. Thus he controls the civil administration
of Germany, and his influence is strong in the schools, the public services
and the police.

Born in the Palatinate in 1877, Frick studied law and became a
Beamter, an official. In 1917 he was head of the political section of the
Munich police. In this position he was able to do valuable service for
the Nazis, by protecting the party when it was small and insignificant,
and making things easy for Nazi law-breakers and hooligans. He was
assistant chief of police when Hitler made his 1923 revolt, and actively
connived with him as ^‘inside" man. As a result he was charged with
high treason and convicted, but he never served his sentence.

Frick is an official, a bureaucrat, through and through. Hitler is not
intimate with him, but he respects him. He became minister of the
interior because he was the only important Nazi with civil service
training. Precise, obedient, uninspired, he turned out to be a faithful
executive; he has been called the “only honest Nazi.”

Yet no one should think that this dry, so-typical German Beamter is
not capable of great, exhilarating Nazi words and deeds. It was Frick
who drafted the Aryan law defining Jewishness unto the third genera-
tion. It was Frick, a cabinet minister in Thuringia, who enforced com-

INSIDE EUROPE

pulsory prayers on all schoolchildren: hate-prayers for the destruction
of the Treaty of Versailles. And m the Reichstag, as the senior Nazi
deputy, Frick once introduced a law for the castration of homosexuals
(cf. Heil, p. 69). This did not endear him to Heines or Roehm. Frick
has always been on the side of the conservatives in the party, like
Goering.

A fierce intra-party battle for the control of cultural affairs has
been waged. Goebbels asserts that all art is propaganda and therefore
belongs co him. Rosenberg holds that art is Weltanschauung and should
thus be in his province. Goering, as boss of Prussia, feels that art is
the prerogative of the executive authority, and therefore his. Rust,
minister of education, would like culture as part of his domain, but
being only a lion of the second magnitude, he is silent while the others
bark. And Frick, the while, holds on to all he can.

His seven precepts for the education of the young are vigorously
nationalist. And German school books — ^a profoundly important point
— ^are compact with an appallingly militant, aggressive, pan-German
propaganda.

Hess the Indispensable

Rudolf Hess, born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1896, is the Fiihrer's
personal deputy, the deputy-leader of the party, and Reichsminister
without portfolio. When Goering, after the murder of Schleicher, under-
went a temporary period of severe unpopularity with the Reichswehr,
Hess — ^had he been bold and assertive enough — ^might have taken his
position. But the talents of Hess lie otherwise. He is the private secre-
tary par excellence, the watchdog, the faithful servant. Hess, like so many
others, was converted to Hitlerism on first hearing the Leader speak ;
like Goering and Ley, he was a flying officer during the war. He was
the first “gentleman” to join the Nazi party, and he became Hitler’s
personal secretary in 1923. For a time he had been secretary to the in-
fluential and mysterious Professor Haushofer, the geographer.

The strength of Hess lies in his closeness to Hitler. He has no gov-
ernment department, but, a cabinet minister himself, he acts as a co-
ordinator between the other ministries. Hitler has given him several
thankless jobs: for instance the onus of making the first public apologia
for the murders of June 30. It is very difficult to get to Hitler on any
political or party business except through Hess. His office is thronged

THE OTHER LITTLE HITLERS

with office-seekers and it has been nicely termed the Klagemauer (Wail-
ing Wall) of the Third Reich. When the Polish campaign began Hitler
said that Hess, after Goering, would be his successor.

Hess has recorded that in Alexandria he became a nationalist, during
the war a socialist, and in Munich after the war an anti-Semite. There-
fore his soul was ripe for Hitler’s seed. His anti-Semitism is rigorous
and extreme. During his Egyptian years, incidentally, he came very
much under Arab influence.

Hess is retiring in character, genuinely modest, and very popular.
At every Parteitag in Nuremberg (annual Nazi congress) he receives
the biggest applause next to Hitler: far more from the Nazi rank-and-
file than Goering, Goebbels, Rosenberg, or Frick. His whole life is
devoted to Hitler. His only outside interest is faith-healing, and he has
founded a hospital in Dresden devoted to cures by means that scientific
medicine does not recognize.

Hitler appointed him to become the head of the political section of
the Nazi party in the fall of 1932, after the disgrace of Strasser. Previ-
ously, except in Hitler’s intimate circle, he had been little known. The
appointment was sound politics. With his usual perspicacity, Hitler chose
as his deputy the one man in Germany who was not ambitious for a
better job. Yet Hess’s control of the party machine is an important
political factor.

Hess was named as the German official who collaborated with Trotsky
for the overthrow of the U.S.S.R. in the Moscow treason trial of Janu-
ary, 1937 — ^strange as it may seem.

Boss of the Black Shirts

Heinrich Himmler wears pince-nez and looks like a schoolmaster.
He is one of the most sinister personalities in the new Germany. He is
two things: first, Reich commander of the SS (Black Shirts), second,
head of the entire German police, including the Gestapo, or secret
police. He is the Boss of Terror, despite his mild appearance.

Born in Munich in 1900, Himmler, like so many of his colleagues,
belonged to a nationalist gang of guerrilla fighters; like Bruckner,
Goering, Streicher, Hess and other prominent leaders, he took part in
the Putsch of 1923, In 1927 he became deputy leader of the SS, which
was being formed by Hitler as a counterweight to the SA of Roehm.
In 1929 he became supreme leader of the SS and in 1934 chief of the
political police.

INSIDE EUROPE

The SS, as we have seen, are the picked Nazi forces. Himmler him-
self has said, 'The SA is the Line, the SS are the Guards.'^ Every SS
man must obey especially strict standards of discipline; he must be of
satisfactory height and appearance ; he may not marry until he and his
bride are certified by Himmler’s Eugenics Bureau as irreproachably
Aryan and healthy potential parents.

This man, holding in his person the double job of policeman and SS
ruler, fulfills an important function. The Gestapo and SS between them
are invincible. The police arrest people. The SS guard them in concentra-
tion camps. Himmler is all-powerful at each end. He is policeman, judge,
guard, and — if necessary — executioner. Besides, he is a convenient
instrument for the civil side of the party, in that he can obey secret
orders and fulfill them, while the government officially disclaims "knowl-
edge” of what he does.

Himmler almost never makes speeches. Of all the Nazi luminaries,
he is the least known. The man "behind” him is said to be an even more
sinister character, by name Heydrich, an ex-naval officer.

Former Court Jester

The volcanic Dr. Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, known every-
where as "Putzi,” is half American and he has an American wife. His
mother was a Massachusetts Sedgwick; his father owned a famous
Munich art firm. Putzi went to Harvard and then opened an art shop
in New York. Alexander Woollcott wrote a delightful sketch of him,
recalling those lost American days; such is the extremity of Hanf-
staengl’s Germanism that, reading it, he became enraged to the point
of literal incoherence, denouncing the article as an anti-German plot
designed to humiliate and shame him.

Hanfstaengl is a big, stooping figure with lank black hair falling
over a caved-in face. His conversation is hard to follow. It is abstracted
amusing, fanciful, forceful, and extraordinarily disjointed. I have hearc
him, in one sentence, variously refer to Hitler as "the Leader,” "th(
Chancellor,” "Herr Hitler,” and "Adolf.” It was as if a person clos<
to Roosevelt should say, "I must hurry away to tell Franklin that th
President must remember that F.D.R. is making a speech to-night.
Once he sued a London newspaper for a very considerable sum, be
cause it quoted him to the effect that if the British didn’t behave bette
toward Germany, he would send some of his Nazi swine across th
Qiannel and burn down Oxford. He denied having made the remarl

THE OTHER LITTLE HITLERS 75

He left Germany in 1937, apparently having fallen out with Hitler,
and became an exile in England.

Bodyguard

Lieut. Bruckner, the chief bodyguard, officially known as Adjutant
to the Fuhrer, is, as befits his post, one of the huskiest men in Ger-
many. He is at least six feet four and a tremendous specimen of agile
muscularity, Bruckner is never far from Hitler. He sleeps just outside
Hitler’s room. He was born in Baden-Baden in 1884 and, like Himmler,
joined a corps of nationalist volunteers after the War. He and the
Leader, as we have noted, are inseparable; Bruckner was the man
at Hitler’s side when he arrested Roehm. He is in the SA, not SS, with
the rank of brigadier-general.

Nuremberg Jew-Fancier

Of all the leading Nazis, Julius Streicher is the most violent. This rapa-
cious anti-Semite, the Reichscommissar for Franconia, is a man of
fifty-four, beady-eyed, barrel-chested, shaven-headed, in appearance the
very incarnation of brutality. Not only in appearance. He has the
characteristics of a sadist. At one Parteitag in Nuremberg he was seen
beating back a crowd of cheering Nazis outside Hitler’s hotel, waiting
for a glimpse of their Leader, with a horse-whip. According to Heil,
in July, 1933, he ordered two hundred and fifty Jews who had been
arrested to pluck grass out of a field with their teeth.

Streicher organized the anti- Jewish boycott held in Berlin in April,
1933, just after the Nazis came to power. This was one great show that
Dr. Goebbels did not put on. It was not repeated. Streicher publishes
a weekly newspaper, Der Sturmer, solid with viciously revolting anti-
Semite propaganda. Once he issued a special "'Ritual Murder” issue.
It caused such a storm of protest in the outside world — ^by the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury for instance— that it had to be suppressed in
Germany.

Streicher is quoted by Time (April 8, 1935) as follows:

"With my riding-whip, I sometimes give it to prisoners I have had
taken into protective custody to save them from the mob. Take that
school-teacher Dr. Steinruck who used to talk so big ! I went with several
Party members into his cell He began to talk with a weeping voice and
acted like a schoolboy. He did not act like the man I had expected after
so much big talk, so I gave him a good thrashing with my whip.”

76 INSIDE EUROPE

On his fiftieth birthday the local authorities made him a picturesque
gift — ^the dossier in the archives of the Nuremberg police which ""for-
merly might have been used against him as incriminating material.”
Streicher's proudest boast is that he has cleared one Franconian district,
Hersbruck, comprising thirty-six villages and 22,000 inhabitants, en-
tirely of Jews. Not a single Jew remains. Everywhere in Franconia
the terror against the Jews proceeds with miserable ferocity.

His general culture is not too brilliant. When he came to Berlin in
August, 1935, to speak at the Sport-Palast meeting he said: ""The great
Jew who lived in England, Benjamin Disraeli, became Premier. Later
he was elevated to the peerage under the name of Lord Gladstone.”

It is no use, as some sympathizers do, saying that Hitler personally
""deplores” Streicher’s blood-thirsty brutality. Hitler does not deplore
it. He has been given every opportunity to get rid of Streicher. He re-
fuses to do so. Streicher is one of his oldest supporters. Streicher joined
him in 1923, having first formed a rival ""workers” party. Hitler has
commended him highly and in public. Only two Nazis are mentioned by
name in the whole of Mein Kampf: Hess and — Streicher. And when
Streicher turned fifty. Hitler especially flew to Nuremberg from Berlin
to pay him a surprise birthday visit.

Two Lesser Lights

Count Wolf von Helldorf, appointed police chief in Berlin during
the second wave of Nazi terror against the Jews, in July, 1935, has a
peculiar qualification for his post: he was himself sentenced to jail in
1931 for personally leading a violent anti-Semitic demonstration on the
same street, Kurfiirstendamm, where the new riots, which he was ap-
pointed to ""clean up,” occurred.

Helldorf had violent habits as a Reichstag deputy. In one brawl he
seized a water jug on the speaker’s desk and smashed it over the head
of a colleague. He was also given to throwing ink-wells and ""other con-
veniently small and heavy objects.” He was too rough even for Hitler,
and for a time he was ""exiled” to Potsdam. Now he is chief of police in
the fourth largest city in the world.

Baldur von Schirach is the leader of the Youth Movement. He was
bom in 1907, and is married to the daughter of Heinrich Hoffman, who
is Hitler’s personal photographer. He is fanatically devoted to Hitler,
given even to writing verses to him. He is interested in religion. Recently
he said, ""The Nazi party has been proved to have better relations with

THE OTHER LITTLE HITLERS 77

the Lord of the Heavens than had the Christian parties which disap-
peared/* And note well : von Schirach, like several other Nazis who min-
gle religion with nationalism, has become a pagan.

Two Radicals

These, though their names are seldom heard outside Germany, are
among the most important Nazis. They are Dr. Robert Ley, supreme
boss of the trade unions and leader of the German labor front, and R.
Walter Darre, ‘Peasant Leader’* and Reichsminister for agriculture.
Both are known as ^‘radicals.”

Darre, born in Buenos Aires^ in 1895, is something of a scholar. He
entered the inner ranks of Nazi nobility not by way of freebooting and
brawls in Munich but — ^very late from.the hierarchical point of view —
as an agrarian expert. He had been a civil servant in the ministry of
agriculture. He was hoisted into office after Hugenberg faded out.
Promptly he initiated an ambitious series of agricultural reforms, and
to him credit is due for almost all the ^‘socialist” measures the Nazi
government has undertaken. Darre arranged a price-fixing scheme for
grain, and he inaugurated the Hereditary Farms Act, by which old-
established peasant holdings may not be sold or mortgaged, but must pass
in entail to descendants of the owners.

Darre was a little too quick for his superiors. And they frowned at
what they called his lack of modesty and tact when, a few months after
taking office, he caused a monument to be erected to himself at Wies-
baden, marked ‘'Blood and Soil,” and himself made a speech at its
dedication. The party, however, has no cause to complain of his racial
zeal. Darre is the author of the celebrated scheme to divide all the
women of the Reich into eugenic classes, like cattle, for breeding
purposes.

Dr. Robert Ley, the leader of the trade unions, is, according to Heil,
a dipsomaniac. Once he received an American newspaperman and was
too drunk to speak. He went to Geneva, before Germany left the
League, to attend a meeting of the International Labor Office, and
before an audience partly composed of South Americans made a re-
markable speech denouncing inhabitants of several South American
republics as uncivilized “idiots,” Several times Dr. Ley .has been in
police courts. Once he wrecked the interior decoration of a beer-hall
in Cologne; once he assaulted the socialist leader, Otto Weis, cracking

^ Another chieftain — like Hess — ^not German by biith. Also Rosenberg.

INSIDE EUROPE

a bottle on his skull. Ley lives in a luxurious villa in Berlin that pre
viously belonged to a Rhineland industrialist, Otto Wolf. One of hif
first official jobs on becoming director of the Labor Front was tc
order thirty-two Mercedes cars (the German equivalent of Rolls-Royce)
for his department. In 1934 control of the trade unions’ funds was
transferred to the jurisdiction of the party organization to get then
out of Ley’s hands.

He was a pilot during the war. He then became a chemist. He enterec
the party early. When Strasser was disgraced, in November, 1932, Le)
and Hess together succeeded to his posts. To Hitler he is unswervingl}
loyal, and so the Leader keeps him.

Ley’s grandiloquence is notable. Listen: '*We begin with the chile
when he is three years old. As soon as he begins to think, he gets i
little flag put in his hand ; then follows the school, the Hitler Jugend
the SA and military training. We don’t let him go ; and when adoles-
cence is past, then comes the Arbeitsfront and takes him again anc
doesn’t let him go till he dies, whether he likes it or not.”

The Warriors

The immensity of German military strength, both material and spir-
itual, is no longer news to anybody. Rearmament was covert unti
October, 1933, when Germany left the League; an open secret unti
March, 1935, when Hitler tore up the military clauses of Versailles
and introduced conscription; since March, 1935, the Reich has been ar
enormous military camp, with no falseface about it.

As well as anything else, a little joke best summarized the coven
period. Frau X asks her husband, a worker in a perambulator factory
to procure her a baby-carriage. He promises to filch the parts, piec^
by piece, from the factory. Some months later they have all beer
stolen, and Herr X sets to work putting them together. He turns finall)
to his wife in puzzled despair: ^T have put the thing together thre^
different times, and each time it turns out to be a machine-gun.”

This era is long past. For a time, it is true, the Germans labored undei
certain disadvantages. There was difficulty in the import of essentia
raw materials. The air force grew enormously, but even as late as 193;
there were severe shortages of heavy guns and tanks. On the other hand
marvelous technical proficiency plus a centralized direction of effon
produced extraordinary results. The navy expanded. The Reichswehi
was enlarged to a "peace” strength of 850,000 men. According tc

THE OTHER LITTLE HITLERS 79

Winston Churchill, the country by 1938 was spending the stupendous
sum of £800,000,000 annually on arms.

The minister of war until early 1938 was Col. General Werner Eduard
Fritz von Blomberg. Born in 1878 at Stargard in Pomerania, he came
of a distinguished officers’ family. He entered the army and for a long
time his promotion was very slow. He was second lieutenant in 1897, first
lieutenant in 1907, captain in 1911, and only colonel in 1925. This seems
to indicate that his war service was undistinguished After 1928 his rise
was extremely rapid. He was major-general in 1928, lieutenant-general
in 1929, full general in 1930, minister of defense in 1933, colonel-
general (the highest German rank except field-marshal) in 1934.

He was by no means a typical Prussian officer. Pleasant, cordial, calm,
rather soft in manner, he seemed the last remove from a martinet, a goose-
stepper. He spoke languages and has traveled widely; in 1930 he took
a vacation in the United States. The importance of Blomberg was that
he was deeply, passionately devoted to Hitler. He was a hegeisterter
Naz% quite different from those officers who, granting that Hitler is a
convenience, found much that was offensive in his fanaticism. Blom-
berg was an ardent, convinced, personal Hitlerite.^

He had known Hitler well only since 1933. His appointment as min-
ister of war came in odd fashion. There was some difficulty to find a
man, on account of the sharp clash between Schleicher and the Nazis.
One of Hitler’s best friends was, and is, Ludwig Muller,® then a mili-
tary chaplain in the division which Blomberg was commanding. He
recommended Blomberg to Hitler, and through this priestly interme-
diary Blomberg got the job. Then Muller, as reward, was made Reichs-
bishop of the Protestant Church in Germany!

Under Blomberg for a long time was General Werner Freiherr von
Fritsch, the chief of army direction {Chej der Heeresleitung) , i.e.,
commander-in-chief. Fritsch was a quite different type from Blomberg.
He was the complete army man. Nothing meant anything to him except
the army. He represented exclusively the army point of view. Blomberg,
it was said in Germany in the old days, was '^Hitler-loyal” ; Fritsch was

^ For Blomberg^s sudden dismissal from the ministry of war, see Chapter VIII
below.

® One of Miiller^s feats was production of a new Nazi version of the Sermon on
the Mount. In the King James Bible, for instance, Matthew 5 *‘9 reads as follows:
^'Blessed are the peace-makers; for they shall be called the children of God”
The Nazi “translation” is : “Happy are they who keep the peace with their fellow-
nationals (italics mine) ; they do God^s will.”

INSIDE EUROPE

^'Fatherland-loyal.” Fritsch did not want the Reichswehr to be increased
to as many as eight hundred and fifty thousand men. He thought this
was too much. He was a firm believer in the Seeckt principle : of an army
like a flail, a sword ; an army not too big, but perfectly tempered, per-
fectly trained, superlatively supple, swift, sure.

When Blomberg went, Fritsch went too — ^though for a different rea-
son. For a time he lived in strict retirement, nursing his grievances.
He was such a valuable officer, however, that he was rehabilitated in
August, 1938, and given a small command. But other generals had taken
control of the army as a whole, like the redoubtable Ludwig Beck (who,
however, subsequently followed Fritsch into retirement). In the fighting
before Warsaw Fritsch was mysteriously killed. His friends say that
he was so heartsick that he wanted death. But rumors have not been
lacking to the effect that Nazis murdered him.

Hitler reorganized the army command with himself as supreme leader.
There is no minister of war. He is like the Kaiser, the all-high chief.
Then comes Colonel General von Keitel, a kind of administrative officer
in charge of liaison to the three heads of the fighting services, Marshal
Goering for air. Admiral Raeder for the navy, and Colonel General
Heinrich Walther von Brauchitsch for the army. Brauchitsch was born
in 1889, the son of a general. He served on the General Staff in the great
war, and has had a routine career. He has never played an important
political role, as have so many German generals.

Hitler and the Reichswehr

Is Hitler dependent on the Reichswehr for support? Yes. But is not
the Reichswehr loyal to Hitler? Again yes. Indeed, the question that is
so often asked is rather pointless, viz., which, as between Hitler and the
Reichswehr, is really boss in Germany. The fact is that both rule Ger-
many. And so long as their aims are identical little chance of conflict
between them exists.

The Reichswehr is a necessity to Hitler, but also Hitler is a neces-
sity to the Reichswehr. Each needs the other. They are complements.
The Reichswehr wants a strong, united Germany and Hitler is incom-
parably the strongest man in the country. The alternative to him is
either an overt military dictatorship or chaos. The Reichswehr has no
need of an overt military dictatorship, which would be unpopular, as
long as Hitler does his job. And it certainly does not want chaos.

Moreover, one should not forget the oath that every officer and

THE OTHER LITTLE HITLERS

soldier in the army swore to Hitler personally. Prussian officers and
soldiers do not break their word of honor lightly. On the other hand,
should the Reichswehr betray Hitler, he is doomed.

Do not, finally, forget that the Reichswehr, from the very beginning,
supported Hitler. Reichswehr money made the first party organization
and the early Volkische Beobachfer possible. And Hitler began ‘‘public’^
life as a Reichswehr spy.

Chapter VII

War, Peace, Policy, and Cash

The Germans do not want a war; all they wa/nt are the re-
wards of victory.

— ^JuLES Cambon

O N MARCH 7, 1936, with flamboyant suddenness. Hitler sent his
troops into the Rhineland, provoking what was in a sense the
greatest European crisis since 1919. By terms of the peace treaties the
Rhineland zone was to have been demilitarized in perpetuity. Germans
— ^with much justice — resented bitterly the “inequality” thus symbolized
between themselves and the other powers. But Hitler not only invaded
the Rhineland; by so doing he automatically tore up the Treaty of
Locarno, which had been a bastion of European peace since 1925,
through its guaranty by Britain and Italy of both sides of the Franco-
Belgian-German frontier. Inviolability of the Rhineland zone was part
of the Locarno Treaty. And Hitler’s destruction of this treaty split
Europe open like a rotten melon.

Some of the French wanted to march; and didn’t quite have the
nerve. Most of the British wanted to temporize — ^and did. The Italians,
annoyed by sanctions in the Abyssinian crisis, refused to join Britain,
France, and Belgium in a united Locarno “front.” As was inevitable,
Italy and Germany — ^long separated by their quarrel over Austria — ^tended
to come together. The Belgians, led by a man who quickly gained
great respect throughout Europe, Paul Van Zeeland,^ were especially
exasperated by the crisis. Not only was Belgium virtually defenseless,
as in 1914, against the enormous might of Germany, but Hitler had
defended the Rhineland coup on the pretext that the Franco-Soviet
pact of mutual assistance, which was about to be ratified in Paris, was
itself a violation of the Treaty of Locarno. But Belgium was as much
endangered by the new situation as was France, and with the Franco-
Soviet pact Belgium had nothing whatever to do.

A great concourse of statesmen met in London to patch up the mat-
^ For Belgium see Chapter XXXV below.

WAR, PEACE, POLICY, AND CASH 83

ter. They were confronted, of course, with the ancient and honorable
problem of how to lock the stable door after the horse had fled. For ten
days they wrangled to find a formula for settlement. British opinion,
at first sharply pro-German, veered to realization of the future disasters
implicit in Hitler’s treaty-breaking. In the end Herr von Ribbentrop,
then the German ambassador-at-large, accepted an academic rebuke by
the League Council m return for consideration of a ‘"peace” plan which
the Leader had announced. Hitler, that incredible creature, meantime
publicly told the world what he really was — 3 , somnambulist! — ^and
received a 98.81 per cent vote of confidence from the German people.

The Peace Plan proposed (a) a twenty-five years’ non-aggression
pact between Germany, France, and Belgium, (b) a western air pact,
(c) “moral” disarmament, (d) an eastern security pact including Lith-
uania, but excluding Soviet Russia, (e) return to the League by Ger-
many if these and other conditions were fulfilled, (f) abolition of
heavy tanks and heavy artillery. There was also an amazing incidental
Hitlerism — b. suggestion that not only Germany but France should hold
a plebiscite on these issues. Also included was a reference to colonial
equality within a reasonable time.

Careful scrutiny of the Plan showed at once that its face value
might be high, its inner value dubious. Non-aggression pacts — ^there
have been some two hundred in the post-war years — ^have not proved
effective. Mutual assistance pacts Hitler eschewed — ^because they might
be effective. The pacts he proposed, it seemed, would have two effects :
to allow him to take on enemies one by one, and to freeze the western
frontiers so that his hands would be free for the East. Hitler’s enmity
to the Soviet Union — ^at that time — ^seemed subcutaneous and inefface-
able. Suggestions for “moral disarmament,” including suppression of
publications and educational books making for bad feeling between
France and Germany, came strangely to say the least from the country
where the Sturmer is published and where implacably nationalist mili-
tarism is hammered daily into the young. A western air pact on a
quantitative basis was, most experts considered, a technical impossibility,
and Hitler’s proposal for it a mere gesture. As to tanks and heavy
artillery, these were precisely the weapons in which Germany was
weakest; therefore let them be abolished! Above and beyond all this
was the question of Hitler’s good faith. What, in effect, he was
doing was to promise not to violate any more treaties immediately after

84 INSIDE EUROPE

flagrantly tearing one up — ^and at the same time denying that he had
done so,

A tedious and nerve-wracking period of diplomatic jockeying and
bargaining ensued. Hitler’s victory was complete in that he got what
he wanted, the militarization of the Rhineland. But an emphatic White
Paper of the Locarno powers told him, to his annoyance, that Britain
and France were provisionally bound by what amounted to a defensive
military alliance against German aggression, and talks between the
General Staffs of the two countries began. Mr. Eden then sent a ques-
tionnaire to Berlin, and a pretty document it was. As a manifest of
Hitler’s good faith it asked — ^politely but very firmly — ^if he were
prepared to include Soviet Russia in his eastern pact, and what as-
surances he could give of the sanctity of future treaties. The question-
naire put Hitler in a tight spot, and he never answered it.

Meantime the thoughtful sought to digest a sentence from his March
14 speech: "1 do not believe that there can be peace among the nations
until they all have the same law and system of law. That is why I hope
that National Socialism will one day extend over the world. That is
no fantastic dream, but an achievable object.”

Rome-Berlin Axis and Anti-Comintern Pact

In September 1936 the British tentatively suggested conversations
toward a new Locarno; the German answer was indecisive. Again in
January, 1937, Mr. Eden sought to open negotiation; again the Germans
quibbled and delayed. Two events of major importance meantime oc-
curred, serving to push Hitler to different tangents. Both gave the
democracies of the world cause for legitimate alarm.

1. On November 25, 1936, Germany and Japan announced suddenly
the conclusion of what was soon known as the Anti-Comintern Pact.
The agreement, directed "^against the communist international,” was
to last five years; it bound Germany and Japan to consultation and
collaboration and established a permanent committee, ''both investigative
and defensive,” against the Comintern; Ambassador Ribbentrop who
signed it on behalf of Germany called it ‘‘an epoch-making event, a
turning point in the defensive struggle of all nations loving order and
civilization.” The pact was, of course, short-lived, though we did not
know this then. The Russo-German agreement in the summer of 1939
killed it deader than Cheops.

2, Something that came to be called the “Rome-Berlin axis” evolved.

WAR, PEACE, POLICY, AND CASH 85

This was not a formal treaty between Hitler and Mussolini, but a
gradual approximation of their policies. Germany and Italy commenced
a period of very close cooperation; they intervened in Spain together
and they recognized the Franco ‘‘government’’ in identical notes sent
the same day. Goering, Blomberg, Neurath, visited Rome; Mussolini
presently went to Germany, and Hitler later repaid his visit.

Soon the axis became a triangle, when Italy joined the Anti-
Comintern pact as an original signatory. But for further developments
in this direction we must await Chapter VIII.

Before the Deluge

It was said in pre-1939 days, on the basis of several arguments, that
war was impossible for Hitler. Let us explore in retrospect.

First, it was said that Germany was too poor to make a war. But
poverty has never prevented conflict. It may make the war hard to
carry on, but a desperate country, already poverty-stricken, has less
to lose by war than the rich countries which oppose it.

Second, it was argued that Germany didn’t have raw materials
enough to make a war. The answer to this is she probably had as good
an equipment of war materials in 1939 as in 1914 when, despite blockade,
she managed to fight a very good war for four long years.

Third, it was said that opposition to Hitler within the Reich was
too strong; that the workers would not mobilize; that they would
shoot in the wrong direction. But the lesson of the totalitarian state
is that each year it stays in power the strength of opposition lessens.
Look at Soviet Russia. And look at Mussolini’s success in Abyssinia.
“Good propaganda,” Frances Gunther expressed it, “can make any-
thing popular — even death.”

On the other hand, Germany’s will to war was shown by an impressive
list of factors. For one thing, the creation of the new German army and
air force. For another, the fact that essential German ambitions to ex-
pand in the East or in Central Europe could only be achieved by war.
Underground aggression in Austria, threats against Lithuania, agita-
tion and intrigue among Germans ever3rwhere — ^in Switzerland, Holland,
Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Scandinavia, the Baltic States — vindicated
the latent explosive force of the Nazi revolution. All the frontiers of
Germany tingled from the aggressive strain inside.

Again, Naziism, essentially a militarist creed, produced in Germany

INSIDE EUROPE

a renascence of incorrigibly belligerent Wotanism that was apt to burst
outward whether Hitler so desired or not. This factor was intensified
by the possibility of economic breakdown. The lesson of the Abyssinian
war seems to have been that dictatorships, if they are in danger of
breaking down, break out. Thus the steady German advance against
Austria, the Sudetenland, and Poland.

Post-war Germany is one of the Have-Nots, since Germany lost the
war. But her policy was not only to regain what she lost, which would
have been fair enough, but much more. It is a paramount item in the
Nazi creed that all contiguous Teutons should be incorporated into the
Third Reich. This meant Austria, and then the Germans of Czecho-
slovakia, Poland, Denmark, Holland, and perhaps — eventually — ^the
Italian Tyrol. For Naziism stands for renascent pan-Germanism or
nothing.

Germany’s will to expand is to be explained not so much by increase
in the birthrate, but by "'moral” factors : Germany’s right to a place in
the sun, Germany’s bursting energy demanding outlet. The birthrate is
not, in long perspective, increasing, but actually decreasing; according
to present estimates the population of Germany (within 1938 fron-
tiers) will be only about 49,000,000 in 1975. As to the necessity of
expansion, it is illuminating to recall that in 1914 the total population
of Germans in the German colonies was only about 25,000, which
was fewer than the number of German residents in, of all places,
Paris.

Hitler, confronted by a hostile world, had to survey his objectives with
great caution. One should remember that Germany had gone a long way
toward redressing the injustices of Versailles before he came to power.
Foreign military control was abolished early in the Weimar republic.
The Rhineland was evacuated of foreign garrisons under Stresemann.
Reparations disappeared under Bruning and Papen. And the Allies
accepted Germany’s theoretical right to military equality under Papen-
Schleicher.

Hitler continued the process, by introducing conscription, reacquir-
ing the Saar, occup3ring the Rhineland with troops, and denouncing
the war-guilt clauses of the Versailles treaty. Concurrently, he left
the League of Nations and gave up German claims on the Polish Cor-
ridor for ten years (because it was temporarily essential for him,
hemmed in, to come to terms with Poland). His progress cost him a
good deal. He was, for a time, about as popular internationally as small-

WAR, PEACE, POLICY, AND CASH 87

pox. He alienated Mussolini, who might have been his friend; he
frightened and annoyed Denmark, Holland, Switzerland; he united
France, ‘‘because the French Right hates Germany, the Left hates
Hitler” ; he temporarily knit the Soviet Union, the Little Entente, and
France into an alliance against him. He thought to counterbalance all this
by gaining British friendship. His whole plan was that England should
cover the German rear. But his plan — ^failed.

Hitler himself has said:

“It must be understood that in general the will of the German nation
should no longer be limited to mere passive defense, but, on the con-
trary, should be steeled for a final, active settlement with France in a
death grapple for the realization of German aims.

“In the annihilation of France, Germany sees merely the means for
our nation to obtain full development in another direction. Our foreign
policy will only have been correct when there are two hundred and fifty
million Germans, not crowded like coohes in a factory, but free peasants
and workers.

“Almighty God, bless our weapons ! Judge if we have merited free-
dom. Lord, bless our combat!”^

The dilemma for the rest of the world was obvious, and like all obvious
dilemmas perplexing in the extreme — ^to allow Germany to become
strong but not too strong. Germany should, manifestly, have been
allowed recovery of her self-respect. But Germany grew so strong that
promptly it demanded a new war as price for former defeat. The
situation was maddening. Germany had been “unjustly” treated.
Granted. The Germans had a perfectly good case, in that the Allies
foisted on the world the myth of exclusive war-guilt, invaded the
Ruhr, and themselves refused to disarm in accordance with the terms
of the treaty which they imposed on Germany. Granted. But it is
interesting to note that Germany was just as militaristic in 1914 when
it could not complain of “unjust” treatment.

The analogies between the international situation in the summer of
1914 and, say, the autumn of 1934 were, indeed, astounding. A homo-
sexual camarilla surrounded Wilhelm II as it did Hitler. Wilhelm II
talked of “shining armor” ; Hitler talked of “race renascent.” Wilhelm
II challenged Britain with a fleet; Goering challenged Britain with an
air force. Lord Haldane went to Berlin in 1912 on a mission precisely

^ These passages are expurgated from the foreign editions of Mein Kampf, It
may be argued that Hitler wrote them, in hot blood, ten years ago. But he has
steadily refused to repudiate them.

INSIDE EUROPE

analogous to that of Sir John Simon in 1935. For Agadir, read Doll-
fuss; for Sarajevo, read — ^lots of things!

How difficult it is for a nation, like an individual, to keep from being
itself !

Foreign Minister Von Rihbentrop

I think we all have had a drop
Too much of Herr von Ribbentrop ;

The name by which he^d better go
Is Herr von Ribben Trop de trop . , .

— ^Maurice Baring.

In the early 30’s Herr von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister
and in 1939 the man, who, on the whole, has more influence on the
Ftihrer than any living person, was virtually unknown. By 1938 he
was certainly one of the most conspicuous public men in Europe and
many lovers of peace thought that he was probably the most dangerous
man alive. This was because he persistently told Hitler that Great
Britain would not, under any circumstances, fight. Hitler trusted him —
and on this basis pursued his adventures, confident that the British
were only bluffing. And Ribbentrop was wrong.

Ribbentrop’s first great coup in foreign policy was the Anglo-
German naval treaty of 193S, which led him to believe that the British
would always be easy to handle. This treaty was important for a variety
of reasons: (i) It legalized German naval rearmament and permitted
Germany to build a fleet one-third as great as the British fleet, which
meant virtual naval parity between Germany and France. (2) It came
directly after the declaration of an alleged “united front” between
Britain, France, and Italy at Stresa and helped to shatter it. (3)
Britain, condemning Germany with one hand for creating an illegal
army, with the other immediately gave permission for her to build a
legal fleet — vindication, the Germans said, that Britain was at long last
on their side,

Joachim von Ribbentrop was bom in 1893 in the Rhineland, the
son of a colonel. He had an excellent education, partly in England,
partly in Switzerland ; he speaks French and English almost faultlessly.
(This, incidentally, was something Hitler admired and it helped bring
him close to Hitler; most of the men around the Leader are monolin-
gual.) Young Ribbentrop emigrated to Canada at eighteen. He had
decided to make his own way in the new world. For a time he worked.

WAR, PEACE, POLICY, AND CASH 89

so the story goes, as a manual laborer in steel construction ; for a time
it seems he was a clerk in a Montreal bank.

The war came; Ribbentrop fled to avoid internment; on a Dutch boat
returning to Europe he hid in the coal bunkers to escape arrest; he
reached Germany and joined the army. He was an officer on the eastern
front and later on the staff of the war ministry. After the war he served
in a minor capacity on the German delegation to Paris, and then, de-
serting public affairs, he went into the wine business. In 1920 he married
Anna Henkel, the heiress of Germany’s biggest champagne manufac-
turer. His ‘‘von” came, curiously enough, through adoption ; some years
after his marriage he was adopted by a titled aunt, Fraulein von Ribben-
trop of another branch of the family, who had no heirs.

His political importance began about 1930. Though not a Nazi at first,
he was an ardent nationalist ; he met Hitler and the Fuhrer liked him.
And this wealthy and polished young man, widely traveled and with
such a knowledge of the world, might be useful. He was. It was Rib-
bentrop, indeed, who helped engineer the meeting between Hitler and
Von Papen in the Cologne home of the banker Schroeder in January,
1933, which, as we have seen, made Hitler’s chancellorship possible.
Hitler, grateful, began to be attached to Ribbentrop.

In 1934 he began to use him on confidential diplomatic errands and to
sound out opinion in other countries. Gradually the “Pi^ro-Ribbentrop”
came into being, a sort of shadow foreign office behind — or in front
of — ^the official foreign office of Von Neurath. Ribbentrop became first
special commissioner for disarmament questions, then ambassador-at-
large. In 1936 he became ambassador to London, where he had a diffi-
cult and trying time. He had to explain the extremities of German
behavior to the British, and perhaps through misguided zeal he com-
mitted curious blunders — for instance giving the Nazi salute to King
George VI. His too-forthright raising of the colonial issue was rebuffed,
and though he was ardently taken up in pro-German circles, his mission
as a whole failed. Nevertheless, on the theory that he “understood”
the mysterious British, Hitler promoted him to be foreign minister.

Ribbentrop has four children. For relaxation he plays the violin. In
general, his personality is amiable.

There should also be a word about Ribbentrop’s predecessor as for-
eign minister, Baron Constantine von Neurath, who is now president

INSIDE EUROPE

of Hitler’s state council. When Hitler became chancellor. President
Hindenburg insisted that Neurath remain in the foreign ministry as a
safeguard against Nazi extremism. Hitler learned to like him and
respect his judgment. And he, apparently, learned to like Hitler.
Curiously enough, he had also, like Ribbentrop, once been German
ambassador to London. Hitler cannot get over being fascinated by
people who presumably “know” the mysterious British.

Neurath was born in 1873 of a noble family in Wurttemberg. He
studied law, then entered the diplomatic service, and experienced the
normal promotions of a professional diplomatist. Always an arch-
conservative — and spiritually at one with the Nazis even when he was
not a Nazi — he made no pretense of deeply admiring the German
republic when he served it at the Court of St. James. It was Neurath,
in a congress at Stuttgart in September, 1937, who formulated a pan-
German program for Germans living outside the Reich. He denied
the right of foreign governments to interfere with Nazi organizations
abroad.

The Incredible Von Papen

The influence of Franz von Papen, “the breakfast chancellor,”® who
is Hitler’s ambassador to Turkey, is still considerable. For a time he
was in sharp eclipse. No wonder. His fundamental policy, the concep-
tion that he and the nationalists could control Hitler and keep him in
order, had been a terrible error. His two closest associates, Jung and
Von Bose, were murdered in his own office. Glad to be rid of him (and
Papen himself must have felt a certain relief to get outside of Ger-
many!), Hitler dispatched him to Austria after the Dollfuss murder in
July, 1934. He came “back” by negotiating the new Austro-German
agreement of July, 1936.

Edgar Jung was a Munich lawyer, and Papen’s dependence on him
was extreme. Papen seldom had ideas of his own. Jung wrote most of
his speeches, including the celebrated Marburg speech. This not only
warned the Nazis to avoid extremism ; it said that “those who threaten
with the guillotine are the first to fall under the ax” ; naturally the Nazis
were annoyed — ^and two weeks later Jung was dead.

What is one to say about a man who can see his two best friends
murdered and then accept new office under the government responsible?

® So called because of his ‘^diplomatic breakfasts,” during which he did most of
his business.

WAR, PEACE, POLICY, AND CASH 91

Papen’s Marburg speech was not his only blunder in technique. Only
a person of extreme lack of perception could have appointed Goering
as his first assistant, as Papen did, and expect Goering — of all men ! — ^to
be a milksop.

Papen has, it is well known, a great reputation for poise, for grace,
for suavity. But suavity in Papen reached a degree where it was a kind
of blind incompetence, a self-assurance so monstrous that all reason, all
caution, were obliterated. It was the suavity of a man who sentences
his best friend to death and excuses himself later by pleading good in-
tentions.

Papen was born in 1879 in Werl in Westphalia. He was a lieutenant
in a cavalry regiment. He married the wealthy daughter of Boch-Galhau,
owner of a Saarland ceramics firm, and was transferred to a better
regiment. In 1913 he went to Washington as military attache. Promptly,
as his job demanded, he engaged in espionage; but the job did not de-
mand the terribly suave carelessness, the persistent "'charming” blunder-
ing, that distinguished him. In December, 1915, before the United States
entered the war, he and his colleague. Captain Boy-Ed, were expelled
from the United States on the ground of their "improper activities.”

It Was bad enough for Papen to be caught. But he let everyone else
be caught. Captain von Rintelen, the well-known German agent, describes
vividly, in a book called The Dark Invader, his horror at Papen’s careless-
ness. The American secret service found in the desk of one of his secre-
taries the key to the German code. Thus the Americans were able to
read German foreign office messages, for instance the one from Zim-
merman suggesting an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

Papen had sailed for Germany. The ship was searched by the British
authorities at Falmouth and his papers were seized — ^he thought a laisses-
passer rendered him immune to search! The young German military
attache had most meticulously retained his checkbooks. In neat black
ink, on stub after stub — one hundred and twenty-six in all — ^were found
the names of German secret agents in America. Papen was pay-out man.
The checks linked him to dynamiters and saboteurs.

No man has ever been caught so comprehensively, so drastically.
Papen had recorded and preserved — ^the most precise details of his
transactions. He kept not only the check stubs but the canceled checks
themselves, so that all the endorsements were available for scrutiny
and investigation. In addition, dozens of his semi-official letters were

92 INSIDE EUROPE

found, carefully filed and assorted in his baggage. One is aghast at the
effrontery of a man who could tempt fate so.

Once bitten, twice shy. For ordinary mortals this adage may hold true,
but not for Junker officers of the imperturbable suavity and self-confi-
dence of Franz von Papen. On arriving in Berlin he was assigned to
service as a liaison officer to the Turkish Army. The British captured
Jerusalem. Captain von Papen fled — ^leaving his trunks behind! Here
was discovered another treasury of documents, including more papers
incriminating agents in America, which Papen still had not destroyed.

One great service to Germany, from the nationalist point of view,
Papen performed ; in basic importance it may outrank his preparation
of the way for Hitler. Early in his chancellorship the German Steel
Trust (Vereinigte Stdhlwerke A,G,), the agglutination of heavy indus-
try that is one of the most powerful industrial forces in the world, suf-
fered a severe financial crisis. Friedrich Frick, the owner of the largest
block of stock, dumped them on the market. It seemed at first that French
steel interests might acquire them. This was intolerable to the industrial
patriotism of the Germans. The Papen government stepped in and took
over Frick’s shares ; the German government became — and still is — ^the
largest shareholder in the greatest industrial concern in Germany.

An incidental point: the State Department in Washington quashed
its criminal indictment of Papen on March S, 1932 — ^when he was still
an obscure figure — ^just two months before he became German chan-
cellor.

Philosopher Rosenberg

From the point of view of underlying and eventual realities in foreign
affairs, Alfred Rosenberg, ''the philosopher with the sour stomach,”
was for a time almost as important as Neurath, Ribbentrop, or Papen.
Rosenberg is the Nasi specialist in foreign policy. He is one of Hitler’s
closest and most intimate associates ; he is editor of Hitler’s newspaper,
the Volkischer Beobachfer; he heads the foreign political bureau of the
Nazi party, and is "director of philosophical outlook”^ for the Reich.

Rosenberg is probably the most disliked man in Germany, next to Dr.
Goebbels. His personality is unpleasant. Like Hitler, he is a bachelor and
"a moral athlete.” The Leader got probably fifty per cent of his ideology
from him, so that it is important to see exactly what he stands for. He

^The full title is imposing: Bemftragter des Fuhrers Zur Uberwachung der
nationdsosialtstischen Bewegung,

WAR, PEACE, POLICY, AND CASH 93

was born on January 12, 1893, in Reval, which was then in Russia and
which is now capital of the border-state Estonia. He is thus a Balt.
Rosenberg’s whole philosophy, ideology, and career are based on a psy-
chopathically intense hatred of the Soviet Union. He studied architecture
(as Hitler wanted to) and for a time was an instructor in draftsman-
ship; he went to school first in Riga, then in Moscow. The revolution
intervened and a period of mystery followed.

He arrived in Munich in 1919 where so many riffraif of the wars
assembled. He was at that time more Russian than German ; he seemed
to be just another White Russian refugee. He met Dietrich Eckart, the
first ‘‘poet” of the Nazi movement, and then Hitler. Promptly he in-
toxicated Hitler’s imagination by his dream of a German empire in the
East, and became the chief prophet of German expansionism and im-
perialism.

Rosenberg is the nightmare dreamer of Naziism. When he attempts
to put his dreams into practice, he is a failure. His only adventure into
practical politics occurred in May, 1933, when he took it upon himself
to make a good-will visit to England. One of his first acts was to lay a
Swastika flag on the Cenotaph ! The British, sensitive about such things,
roared in indignation; Rosenberg scurried back to Berlin, and has not
been outside Germany since.

Rosenberg’s major opus is an enormous book, Der Mythus des Zwan--
sigsten Jahrhunderts (Myth of the Twentieth Century). It is a torpid,
florid, gusty, grandiloquent discourse on race, politics, and Germanism,

Goering’s dislike of Rosenberg is notorious. At a party meeting in
Hamburg in 1925, he said to Gregor Strasser: “Let that damned Rosen-
berg tell us what he did do in Paris during the war.” In 1935 Rosen-
berg decided to erect a monument to the four thousand Saxons slain by
Charlemagne. For each Saxon he wanted to provide a granite block of
a peculiar sort, very old and pure geologically, found only in North
Prussia.® Goering heard of the plan and promptly ordered that no stone
of this kind might be quarried.

Rosenberg’s strength is, like that of so many Nazis, his undeviating
single-mindedness, his obsessive devotion to an idee fixe. With Goering,
it is the air force; with Streicher, the Jews; with Rosenberg, anti-
Sovietism Since the twin pacts between Germany and Russia in 1939#
Rosenberg has had, of course, to keep quiet on this issue.

® The Aryan principle applied to petrology !

INSIDE EUROPE

Unpopular as he is — except with Hitler — Rosenberg’s influence is
considerable. He is a party force of almost first magnitude. It was, for
instance, his private bodyguard of SA, mostly composed of White Rus-
sian guardists, which Hitler chose for the delicate honor of standing
guard on the dying Hindenburg. His strength is founded on Hitler’s
great affection for him and the Leader’s dependence on his "'ideas.”

Cash and Credit

^^Gertnany is Hitler, and Hitler is Dr. Schacht.”

— ^Berlin Saying.

Superficially it seemed that by the end of 1938 the Nazi regime had
produced a considerable degree of economic recovery. This was caused
mostly by the spur to industry of war preparations. Unemployment
had practically disappeared, and the volume of industrial production
was back almost to the 1929-30 level. But this not very substantial boom
was only achieved at frightful cost. The economic fabric of the country
stretched and sagged.

In 1929 German exports amounted to approximately 13,000,000,000
Reichsmarks. By 1933 they had fallen to a value of scarcely 5,000,000,-
000 Reichsmarks, and in 1934 to only 4,187,000,000. Germany had a
passive trade balance for the first time in years in 1934, when it amounted
to 400,000,000 marks. German industry, normally, lives by its foreign
trade. Its foreign trade began to disappear on account of the high gold
value of the Reichsmark, the increase of import restrictions abroad,
and the international boycott.

Yet Germany had to continue to pay for imports. It needed imports
of raw material desperately. It needed silk, rubber, nickel, manganese,
chromium, tungsten, raw textiles, tin, copper, gasoline. Using every
available facility of cash and credit, Germany bought immense stores of
these goods. Purchases of such commodities as Swedish iron ore by the
German Steel Trust mounted year by year. German imports of raw
nickel — an essential war material — ^tripled between 1932 and 1935. And
every effort was made to produce agricultural self-sufficiency, so that the
Reich could feed itself despite blockade.

The search for Ersatz (substitute) materials was unceasing. Sugar
from sawdust ; flour from potato meal ; gasoline from wood and coal ;
clothes from chemical fiber ; tires out of "reclaimed” rubber ; margarine
from coal — ^these were some of the substitutes inflicted on hapless but
patriotic Germans.

WAR, PEACE, POLICY, AND CASH 95

Wages were mercilessly deflated by means of forced payments to
relief, the labor front, the air defense league, and so on. A bank clerk’s
salary, for instance, became 241.90 RM per month instead of 290.25
RM, purely as a result of “voluntary” contributions. H. R. Knicker-
bocker found that a skilled workman, such as an expert joiner, earning
39 RM per week, very high for Germany, had to pay out no less than
10.95 RM in taxes.

Even so, where did Dr. Schacht get all the money from? He had the
quadruple job of paying for imports, financing public work projects to
relieve unemplo3mient, meeting the cost of rearmament, and maintaining
the ordinary budget of the government. His gold reserve dwindled al-
most to nothing; in 1939 the cover was 1.59 per cent. He defaulted on
his foreign debt. He seemingly sucked the last cent out of the German
taxpayer. Yet he needed money, money, money. The cost of the arms
program was estimated abroad at $4,000,000,000 per year. How meet
such staggering bills ?

It seemed, roughly speaking, that Schacht adopted two general
courses. Internally, he juggled by financing the current business of the
government with internal loans from banks, insurance companies, and
the like, which were bled almost empty. They were practically forced
loans. He gave in return government lOU’s worth no more — ^and no
less — than the government’s promise to pay. These forced loans — ^to-
gether with minor items such as conversion at lower interest rates of
former public loans — ^amounted, of course, to nothing less than the
compulsory mobilization of the wealth of the German people. What
were the German people promised in return for their savings? Pros-
perity and peace. Yet the money went to finance a colossal war machine.

Externally Dr. Schacht performed even greater feats of financial jug-
glery. He seems to have been the first money man of the period to have
seized on the idea that the position of a big debtor was better than that
of creditor. He made immense capital out of the fact that Germany owed
money. Schacht, beyond any doubt, is one of the ablest financial experts
alive. He really understands money. What he did may have been un-
scrupulous, but it was brilliant. He made Germany “the most successful
fraudulent bankrupt in the history of the world.”

This happened because he contrived to pay for imports by getting his
creditors to foot the bill. German firms owe money, of course, to Eng-
land, France, Scandinavia, the United States. Exporters in these coun-

INSIDE EUROPE

tries do business with Germany. Dr. Schacht said to them in effect:
“Buy from us, and then we can pay our debts. If you don’t buy, we can-
not pay,” He promulgated partial moratorium after moratorium ; and at
the same time threatened to cease payment entirely unless he got more
business. He was saying : “Buy from me, or you will get nothing at all,
since I cannot finance my debts unless you lend me more.”

There are always people willing to throw good money after bad,
and the situation became that Germany was in reality expanding its
armament industry by new borrowings. The potential enemies of Ger-
many in the next war, France, the small succession states. Great Britain,
and even Soviet Russia, were financing the effort that Germany was
making to destroy them. The process reached its most extreme phase
when, in December, 1934, the Bank of England granted a $3,750,000
credit to Germany in order “to facilitate the mobilization of German
commercial credits,” i.e, so that Germany might have means (new
credit) to meet old debts — ^and build airplanes that can cross the English
Channel in seven minutes.

Also Dr. Schacht performed complex miracles in the field of barter.
He needed raw materials from the Balkans, for instance, and finally the
last gold to pay for them was gone. This deterred Dr. Schacht not at
all. He visited the Balkan capitals, and made arrangements whereby he
paid for tobacco, cotton, minerals, with goods. The Balkan exporters
(exporters in many other countries too, for instance South America)
had large credits in frozen marks in Berlin; Dr. Schacht proposed
to liquidate these marks by payment in German manufactured goods,
particularly munitions. So Greece, for instance, traded a tobacco crop for
a crop of guns. Naturally this increased German political as well as
economic influence in the Balkan regions. Eventually Schacht added
a final fillip to this remarkable process; he “bought” raw materials
actually at a loss, had them shipped not to Germany but to a reexport
point in, say, the Netherlands, and then sold them — for gold or foreign
exchange. With this foreign exchange he was able to import material
from countries which would not subscribe to the barter deals.

Schacht — The Former Money Bags

It took Hitler a long time to find Schacht. He tried and discarded
several economic experts. There was no financial Rosenberg, no eco-
nomic Goering, on hand from the beginning. Hitler’s first choice as eco-

WAR, PEACE, POLICY, AND CASH 97

nomic adviser was a certain retired captain, by name Wagner; for the
past two years he has been in concentration camp. Following Wagner,
a minor industrialist, Wilhelm Keppler, had decisive influence. When
Keppler fell, a new and ambitious economist, Albert Pietsch, president
of the Munich Chamber of Commerce, advanced; he had insinuated
himself into the post of “economic adviser’’ to Hess, Hitler’s deputy.
But meantime Schacht was ready.

He was born in January, 1877, at Tinglef in Schleswig. His father
was a great admirer of the American democratic tradition; thus the
name he gave his son, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. The Hjalmar
came from the mother, who was a Dane. Schacht is very proud of his
Viking ancestry. His children have Danish names.

He studied at several universities in Germany, obtained a doctorate,
and went to work as an archivist clerk in the Dresdener bank — one of
the lowest posts. Clever and ambitious, he rose very quickly. One of his
jobs was to prepare the routine trade bulletins; he did them so well —
combining vigorous unorthodoxy with sly good sense — ^that presently
the director of the bank used them as a guide to policy. So by 1908 he
was deputy director. In 1916 he went to a rival bank, the Darmstaedter
and National, as director.

In 1923, when the mark collapsed, he was appointed Reichs cur-
rency commissioner and he saved Germany from utterly chaotic condi-
tions by inventing the Rentenmark, which stabilized the currency. As
reward for this coup, he was appointed president of the Reichsbank;
he had already refused the finance ministry, which he thought not big
enough. He was Reichsbank president till 1930, when he resigned in
protest at the Hague agreements which implemented the Young plan.
In March, 1933, Hitler appointed him to the presidency of the Reichs-
bank again.

He is a man of utterly boundless ambition. Until he hitched his star
to the Hitler bandwagon, he wanted to be President of Germany. He
is a complete opportunist. He was one of the founders of the democratic
party, in 1919, and the socialists supported him as the man who saved
the mark. The campaign slogan went, ‘'W er hat die Rentenmark er-
dachtf der Demokrat, Herr Dr. Schacht!” But early in 1930 Schacht
saw on which side Germany’s bread was buttered, and he turned to
Hitler. He had met Hitler through Goering.

Dorothy Thompson interviewed Schacht early in 1931. He told her
he was going Nazi. She asked him why. He replied, “Because I believe

INSIDE EUROPE

in everything that encourages German nationalism.” Miss Thompson
said, ‘'But if Hitler comes to power, the Nazis can’t run the country
financially, economically. Who will run it?” Schacht replied, ‘T will.”

Like so many Hitlerites, Schacht has no discernible private life.
He owns an estate in the country, but he preferred living in the bank
itself in town. He wears extraordinary collars, high and jaw-breaking.
He likes good conversation. He is cool, shrewd, witty. His power is based
first on tremendous ability, second on absolutely ruthless and calculating
opportunism. As a boy Schacht had ambitions to be a poet, and one of
his songs, incorporated in a musical comedy, survives :

‘T am a musician, very well known,
and loved in the whole country.

When I arrive in a little town

everybody cheers, the grown-up and the children.

For I play upon my fiddle
first a dance and then a song.

And when people are happy together
I am welcome everywhere.”

Not only was Schacht Hitler’s money man for years, but he contrived
to make himself indispensable as a link between Hitler and the whole
of German economic life. Schacht dominated, for instance, the newly
created Reich economic chamber. Theoretically, this organization em-
braces the labor front, with its fifteen million members, whose dues
amount to 100,000,000 RM per year. Then he became minister of
economics.

Naturally Schacht has no fondness for Goebbels and the “Left” ex-
tremists. He knows full well that anti-Jewish nonsense hurts German
export trade. At Konigsberg, in August, 1935, he denounced the lunatic
rabble, and Goebbels suppressed his speech. Schacht told friends that
his course would lead him to a monument or the scaffold, he did not
know which. Such conflicts, quarrels like these within the party, are
bound to continue; they rise from the very nature of the Nazi move-
ment.

The industrialists influence Schacht as they influence Hitler, but he
is by no means under their thumb. He is under no one’s thumb. It may
be said that Hitler “protected” capitalism, saved capitalism for his
industrialist friends. But this is not quite the truth. Hitler is no friend
of orthodox finance capital. If private profits interfere with the security
of the state, out private profits will go. The industrialists disapproved of

WAR, PEACE, POLICY, AND CASH 99

much of Schacht’s jugglery, and they have found that although Naziism
serves to perpetuate capitalism, it also demands heavy sacrifices of the
capitalists.

Schacht began to slip in 1937, when he was replaced by Goering as
economics dictator. He was too conservative for the radicals in the
party ; he was too proud to remain merely a figurehead. In January, 1939
he gave up his stronghold, the presidency of the Reichsbank to become
minister without portfolio. He left at once for a long holiday in India.
He was succeeded both as minister of economics and president of the
Reichsbank by Dr. Walther Funk, a much lesser man. Funk was a
journalist for many years specializing in economic affairs, and for a time
was Hitler’s press chief. He was born in 1891. His job is one of the most
difficult in Germany.

Hitler has no interest in economics (which was one of the sources of
Schacht’s strength) but economics may be his ruin. The permanent
realities of the economic situation in Germany wait upon no Hitlers, no
Schachts, no Thyssens. When Schacht failed. Hitler found another
would-be Schacht. But the fundamental difficulties remain. Germany must
feed eighty million people; it must borrow or export enough to pay for
imports ; it lives by the manufacture of raw materials, and no financial
hocus-pocus can alter the inexorable law that goods, somehow, must be
paid for.

The day of reckoning will come for Hitler — ^in gold as well as guns#

Chapter VIII

The Fascist Offensive

JVho overcomes by Force
hath overcome but half his foe.

— ^JoHN Milton*

IN NOVEMBER, 1937, Lord Halifax went to Berlin and saw Hitler,
* though ostensibly he visited Germany merely to attend a “Hunting
Exposition/^ The visit was in effect another of the several attempts since
1933, when Germany left the League, to make a general European set-
tlement, to bring the Reich into a scheme of what was then still opti-
mistically called “collective security/’ The visit was a failure as regards
practical results, but it had value in that Hitler at last defined his
terms, told Halifax what he wanted. Halifax, who was then Lord
Privy Seal, returned to London shocked at the extremity of the German
demands. Nor was Hitler boasting. Almost immediately began the
Fascist Offensive which culminated in the acquisition of Austria by
Germany and the assault on Czechoslovakia.

Perhaps when the pious Halifax met the Fuhrer he thought that he
might patch up a compromise like the celebrated compromises he, as
Lord Irwin, had made with Mr. Gandhi. But he found Hitler much
less pliable than the Mahatma.

According to the Manchester Guardian, Hitler presented Halifax
with a series of points as follows :

First, Germany agreed to rejoin the League, provided that the Cov-
enant was redrafted, the machinery for sanctions scrapped, the League
divorced from the peace treaties, and the war guilt clause cancelled.

Second, Germany insisted on the reorganization of Czechoslovakia on
a cantonal system, with something like autonomy for the Sudeten Ger-
mans.

Third, Germany asked Great Britain to refrain from any political or
diplomatic assistance to Austria

Fourth, Germany pledged itself to refrain from raising the issue of
colonies for six years, if Britain would in return promise to assist Ger-
man colonial claims after that period.

100

THE FASCIST OFFENSIVE

101

Fifth, Germany asked that Britain recognize the Italian conquest ol
Ethiopia and the Franco government in Spain, in return for which the
Germans would work for the restoration of peace in Spain.

Revelation of the bold candor and comprehensiveness of these demands
staggered opinion in England. But what was to come was much more
staggering. The next act was the acquisition of Austria in March, 1938.
This extraordinary event, which shook Europe like nothing since
Sarajevo, but which could have been forecast with certainty by anyone
who really knew Hitler’s mind, was assisted by three factors aside from
German single-mindedness and will. We must touch briefly on the three.
First was the development of the Rome-Berlin axis, second was the
purge of the German army high command, third was the resignation
of Mr. Eden as British Foreign Secretary.

The axis had been brought sharply to the limelight by Mussolini’s
visit to Hitler in September, which repaid — ^three years late — ^Hitler’s
visit to Venice in 1934. Community between the Fascist states had
meantime become so close as to be tantamount to an alliance. German
generals, German politicians, incessantly visited Italy, and Count Ciano
went several times to Berlin. Mussolini said, '"German-Italian solidarity
is a living and active solidarity, the expression and result of national
homogeneity and common interests.”

(Mussolini’s nine hours in Munich gave observers a curious side-
light on the extreme and rigorous protective devices necessary when
modern dictators travel. According to the New York Times (Sept. 25,
1937), every train entering Munich was searched, and every motorcar
halted. Every piece of baggage arriving in the Munich station was ‘'seg-
regated and minutely searched.” All the cellars and attics of buildings
along the triumphal route were sealed, and no front windows were
allowed to be opened during the procession. All foreigners were dras-
tically checked upon, and householders had to submit lists of people in
their abodes. No chances to be taken — despite the vast and unprecedented
popularity of the Fascist idols !)

In November, 1937 the anti-Comintem pact which had been signed the
year before between Germany and Japan was extended to include Italy.
The Italians adhered to the protocol as original signatories, and Hitler
announced that the axis had become a triangle— he said that a “great
world-political triangle” had been formed Ostensibly the pact had no
object except opposition to communism, but in Italy Signor Gayda, the
Duce’s well-advertised mouthpiece, said that it gave the three signatories

102

INSIDE EUROPE

"Vast objects of collaboration/’ Its second anniversary, late in 1938, was
resoundingly celebrated both in Berlin and Rome.

Now the important thing about this new Fascist International or
Fascintern, as it came to be called, was Hitler’s position in the center
between Tokyo and Rome. Hitler was the pivot. Straightway it became
clear that Hitler, not Mussolini, was the dominant partner. This made
the acquisition of Austria possible, even though Mussolini strongly op-
posed It. Hitler contrived to get the Duce as an ally, so that it was difS-
cult for him to denounce Hitler without breaking the alliance, which
was essential to him while he was grappling with England. Hitler made
the Duce climb down on the hitherto vital Austrian issue which had
separated them.

Mussolini should have read Mein Kampf more carefully. Listen:
""The binding force of an alliance decreases the more it confines itself
to maintaining an existing condition. On the other hand, an alliance
waxes stronger the more the individual contracting parties are able to
hope they will gain definite, tangible aims of expansion; in which case,
as always, strength lies not in defense, but in attack.”

Hitler writes muddily as always; his language is a fumbling jargon;
it is extraordinary that his behavior in action so belies his style.

Next came the strange episode of the Marshal Blomberg’s mesalliance
and his consequent departure as German minister of war.

Rumors of friction between the Nazi party and the army command
were rife early in January. Berlin buzzed with uncertainty, and the
atmosphere came almost to resemble that which preceded the great blood
bath of June 30, 1934. Then, on January 12, 1938, came a brief an-
nouncement that Marshal Blomberg, 59 years old and for five years a
widower, had married 23-year-old Erika Gruhn, who was presently dis-
covered to be the daughter of a carpenter and a masseuse. Hitler and
Goering, it was announced, had been witnesses at the ceremony.

This would seem to have given the marriage all the official sanction it
needed, but a storm of repressed excitement rose among Blomberg’s col-
leagues and subordinates. They were gunning for Blomberg because
he was considered to be too completely under Hitler’s thumb. His mar-
riage, which violated the strict Prussian code of eligibility for officers’
wives, was no more than a convenient pretext. What really worried
some of the higher officers was Hitler’s policy. Part of the army dis-

THE FASCIST OFFENSIVE

103

approved of the extent of German intervention in Spain; they were
distrustful of the value of an alliance with Mussolini ; they feared that
Hitler’s activism might bring a war for which they were not prepared.
But Blomberg, aci ardent Hitlerite, prevented expression of these dis-
contents. So on January 28 Colonel-General von Fritsch, the chief of
staff and for a long time Blomberg’s rival for supreme military authority,
went unprecedentedly to Hitler and demanded that Blomberg be dis-
missed, since his marriage violated the army code.

Hitler took advantage of this situation with one of his miraculously
effective double-strokes. He fired both Blomberg and Fritsch! Ap-
parently he considered that Blomberg’s usefulness was at an end. As
for Fritsch he had never been as close to Hitler as Blomberg and his
enemies accused him of Hohenzollern sentiments and monarchist flirta-
tions. Behind the story was the familiar picture of bitter rivalries among
the Nazi leaders. Goering was ambitious for more power ; Himmler and
Ribbentrop, representing the left wing, wanted to ''get” the conservative
generals.

But if anyone thought that he would succeed to the high command of
the army he was wrong. With the dramatic statement, "Henceforth I,
personally, will exercise direct command over the entire armed establish-
ment,” Hitler took over the army himself. No new minister of war to
succeed Blomberg has ever been appointed.

The shakeup was peaceable, but it struck in several directions. Thir-
teen generals besides Blomberg and Fritsch were shelved (the official
story incidentally said no more than that their resignations were ac-
cepted on account of "ill health”), and many others were shifted.
Goering became a Field Marshal. Three ambassadors known to be
"moderates” were recalled, and Ribbentrop succeeded Neurath as
foreign minister.

On February 4 Hitler announced the creation of a new cabinet coun-
cil. This became the inner citadel of German power. Its president was
Neurath,^ and its members were Ribbentrop, Goering, Hess, Goebbels,
Dr. Hans Lammers (chief of Hitler’s chancellery staff), the new com-
mander-in-chief of the army Colonel-General von Brauchitsch, the
new chief-of-staff General Wilhelm Keitel, and the commander-in-chief

^ Herr von Neurath later became ‘Trotector^^ of Bohemia-Moravia when Czecho-
slovakia was seized in 1939.

104

INSIDE EUROPE

of the navy Admiral Raeder. This group of nine men, under Hitler,
became the composite ruling power of Germany.

Mr. Eden resigned as British foreign minister on February 21, 1938.
The immediate issue was the angry one of negotiations with Italy. Anglo-
Italian relations had been severely strained since the great sanctions crisis
in 193s, and an attempt to patch them up with an agreement in January,
1937 had not been successful, largely because Italy stubbornly refused
to withdraw its troops from Spain. The British prime minister, Mr.
Chamberlain, desperately wanted a settlement with Italy; in July he had
sent a personal letter to Mussolini, urging resumption of negotiations.
But the Italians continued to pinprick Britain with radio propaganda in
the Near East and with intrigue in Egypt and Palestine. The Spanish
sore still festered with Italian troops.

It seemed that the prime minister, in writing to Mussolini direct, had
gone over his foreign minister’s head. Similarly by dispatching Halifax
to Berlin he seemed to be neglecting Mr. Eden, who disapproved of the
trip. In fact the gap between Chamberlain and Eden was gradually
widening. Chamberlain gave very clear indication that he intended to be
his own foreign secretary. He wanted an agreement with the dictators
at almost any price, if it should lead the way to peace in Europe ; Eden
wanted an agreement too, but not at the sacrifice of vital British inter-
ests. The Italian press kept howling and bleating that Eden must go
if negotiations were to be reopened. Eden said that the Italians should
at least make some gesture first, such as the withdrawal of troops from
Spain. Finally Mr. Chamberlain took matters in hand and received
Count Grandi, the Italian ambassador, at 10 Downing Street to push
a settlement. Promptly Eden resigned.

Lord Cranborne, Eden’s Parliamentary under-secretary, resigned also.
He said in Parliament, ‘T am afraid that if the government enter on
official conversations it will be regarded not as a contribution to peace
but as a surrender to blackmail.”

Eden’s resignation was vastly important because the Fascist powers
deduced from it the apparent fact that the British were not willing to
stand up longer against the dictators. His departure showed them
clearly that no strong opposition to their course existed in England. Eden
was the symbol of the collective system. When he went, the Fascists
knew that the door was open. And the invasion of Austria promptly took
place.

THE EASCIST OFFENSIVE 105

One other factor made it convenient for Hitler to strike when he did ;
a severe cabinet crisis in France deprived France of a government that
fateful week-end.

Hitler and Schuschnigg^

The world, and not only Austria, was electrified on February 12,
1938, to hear that Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor,
devout Catholic and inheritor of the Dollfuss r%ime of Austrian inde-
pendence, had gone suddenly to Berchtesgaden to meet in conference
that other Austrian, Adolf Hitler. This was the opening wedge. Schusch-
nigg delivered himself into the lion’s den. He thought presumably he
was going to get a breathing spell ; what he got was extinction.

First the strange story of an intrigue and a plot that miscarried. Since
July, 1936, Austro-German relations had been ‘‘regularized” ; Germany
promised to respect the independence of Austria and in return the
Austrian Nazis were to be absorbed into Schuschnigg’s patriotic or-
ganization, the Fatherland Front. But of course the Nazis were not
content with this. They were impatient for full power. Ringleaders
among the extremist group decided to make a “Putsch,” thus giving
the German army pretext for immediate invasion. Nazi agents-/>r4?-
vocateurs were to surround the German embassy in Vienna and to make
an attempt on the life, according to one version of the story, of Gen-
eral MuiF, the military attache, and, according to another, of Von Papen,
the ambassador. The Austrian government got wind of this plan, and
several of the conspirators were arrested. The Putsch was scheduled for
January 30, the anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power as Chancellor.
News of the failure of the Putsch got to Berlin; officers of the Reichs-
wehr protested in alarm at the idea; and Hitler suddenly canceled the
great annual speech he customarily delivers on January 30.

The moderate Reichswehr generals did not want an invasion of
Austria ; the two armies had close sympathies, and Fritsch feared inter-
national repercussions. Thus the Putsch plan had a very important bear-
ing on the German army purge. Hitler had to get rid of those officers
who thought the Austrian adventure dangerous.

Papen found himself out of a job in the February shakeup. That
slippery and debonair gentleman had, moreover, no fondness for the
role he was scheduled to play if the Putsch went through. He got Hitler’s
ear and presented an alternative plan. Let Hitler invite Schuschnigg to
Berchtesgaden and talk him out of Austria. Previously Hitler, in high

2 There are detailed chapters about Austria below, Chaps. XXIV-XXVII in-

io6 INSIDE EUROPE

horror, had always refused to have anything to do with Schuschnigg or
any of the other Austrian “traitors,” i.e., loyal Austrians. Hitler, for
want of anything better, accepted Papen's scheme.

Why did Schuschnigg consent to go ? First, he knew that the position
was untenable; an explosion was predictably imminent. To keep the
Germans out was like trying to withstand Niagara with a barn door.
Since the development of the Rome-Berlin axis he was no longer sure
of Mussolini's help, and since Halifax's visit to Germany he was dubious
of the value of Franco-British aid. Both France and Britain were, of
course, pledged to the theory of Austrian independence ; but the year of
our Lord 1938 was yet another year when pledges were torn up like
tickertape. Schuschnigg went to Berchtesgaden because he thought that
somehow, somehow, he might come to terms with Hitler and save some-
thing from the wreck.

Disillusion smote him instantly. He was treated at Berchtesgaden not
only with personal rudeness, but as a political puppet beneath contempt.
He was forced to give up his own bodyguard at the Salzburg frontier,
and accept a “guard of honor” led by enemy Austrians. In eleven hours
of strident talk and listening, he was given exactly one meal; he is a
heavy smoker, but not once was he allowed respite for a cigarette.

Hitler raged and shouted; he threatened immediate armed invasion
of Austria unless Schuschnigg succumbed to his demands. The first
demand was for the inclusion of a man named Arthur Seyss-Inquart as
minister of interior and public security — ^which meant control of
gendarmerie and police — in the Austrian cabinet. The phenomenon of
one dictator demanding the right to compose the cabinet of another is a
strange one even for these times. Schuschnigg compromised by agree-
ing to offer Seyss-Inquart the ministry of justice. Seyss-Inquart — ^inci-
dentally an old friend of Schuschnigg's — ^though not officially a Nazi,
was of course the Nazi's man.

Hitler introduced the new German commander-in-chief. General
Keitel, to Schuschnigg, pointedly reinforcing his threats to cross the
frontier. Hitler screamed at Schuschnigg: “Understand that I consider
myself the Fuhrer not only of the Germans in the Reich, but of all
Germans throughout the world !”

Schuschnigg went back to Vienna, shaken and tormented ; hardly had
he returned when an ultimatum came from Berlin, demanding again that
Seyss-Inquart be given control of the police. Schuschnigg agreed. This —
at 2:30 A.M. on February 16 — was the first ultimatum. . . . The next
day Seyss-Inquart became head of “all the pacification departments in

THE FASCIST OFFENSIVE

107

Austria’* — charming word ‘Opacification” — and immediately flew to
Berlin, there to make contact with Hitler and receive instructions. Mean-
time Nazi passion rose all over Austria; there were riots and demon-
strations in Graz and throughout the country; Nazi political prisoners
were released.

Schuschnigg had one last desperate card. He played it. On March 9
he announced that a plebiscite would be held on March 13 wherein the
people of Austria might freely vote whether or not they wished to re-
main independent.

Mussolini, when he heard of this, is reported to have said, “The pleb-
iscite will go off like a bomb in his hand.” It did. Hitler was enraged.
He flew into one of the wildest tantrums of his career. The reason was
obvious : if the plebiscite were held, he. Hitler, would lose it. The best
authorities in Austria at the time agree that, even then, the Nazis would
not have received better than a forty per cent vote. So it was absolutely
imperative for the Germans to prevent the plebiscite at all costs. Hitler
has recorded that he could not believe his own ears when word of the
plebiscite reached him. He decided that Schuschnigg had betrayed him.
“I determined to act at once.” So, through Seyss-Inquart, an ultimatum
— ^the second ultimatum — ^was presented to Schuschnigg, demanding that
he call off the plebiscite and resign. This was at 4 P M. on March ii.
The Austrian chancellor was given, first till 6 P.M. then to 7 130 P.M.
to accede, or German invasion of Austria would begin. This from Hitler,
who had told Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden that any threat of blood-
shed, of fighting between Germans and Germans, was intolerable and
unthinkable ! At 6 Schuschnigg duly called off the plebiscite, and at 7 150
he resigned.

Schuschnigg said over the radio in a broken voice :

^ “I place on record before the world that all reports to the effect that
disturbances have broken out in Austria and that the government can no
longer control the situation are lies from beginning to end. I am instructed
by the Federal President to inform the Austrian people that we are yield-
ing to force. . . . Determined at all costs even in this grave hour to avoid
bloodshed, we have ordered the Austrian forces to withdraw without
resistance. . . . And so I take my leave of the Austrian people. God save
Austria !”

Even then few people thought that Hitler would go to the extreme
limit of annexing Austria outright. They should have remembered his
tactics after Hindenburg’s death. He is a whole-hogger or nothing*. The

io8 INSIDE EUROPE

Nazis rose in Vienna, and the German troops soon streamed across the
frontier. Hitler arrived in Linz the next day like a Roman conqueror.
On the 13th he announced the Anschluss, and Austria as an independent
state ceased to exist.

Schuschnigg made no attempt to run away. In fact flight was impos-
sible. He was arrested by SS men as he left the chancellery after his
farewell speech, and late in 1939 was still in custody.

Loot

The military, political, economic, and strategic gains to Hitler of the
annexation of Austria were very considerable. The population of the
Reich increased overnight to almost 75,000,000, making Germany with-
out doubt the most powerful country in continental Europe, At least
eight new divisions were made available to the German army, and they
were consolidated into the Reichswehr at once.

Germany got Austria’s Alpin-Montangesellschaft, the biggest iron
works in Central Europe, capable of producing at least 2,500,000 tons
of iron ore a year. It got the munitions industries in Steyr and Hirten-
berg, and the biggest deposits of magnesite — z, mineral useful in airplane
manufacture — in the world. It got a great reservoir of electric power,
dairy industries, and above all timber, which Austria had in profusion
and which Germany badly needed. And not inconsiderable was the $90,-
000,000 in gold found in the Austrian national bank, a quantity of
gold incidentally almost quadruple that possessed by the entire Reich.
(And promptly, of course, Germany repudiated the Austrian external
debt. . . .)

But the chief gains were political. By acquiring Austria, Hitler won
his supreme triumph in foreign policy to date. ‘^On March 12, 1938, Ger-
many won the World War of 1914,” it was nicely said. The German
frontiers were extended to the Brenner Pass, and Czechoslovakia —
ominous! — ^was virtually encircled. Germany squatted like an octopus
beyond the Rhine, astride the Danube, and the countries of southeastern
Europe could not but feel the impingement of its tentacles, the pressure
of its might. Germany now directly faced no fewer than eleven different
countries — ^across some highly perishable frontiers.

Duce Infelix

When Lord Halifax received news of the conquest of Austria he is
said to have buried his face in his hands, muttering “Horrible, hor-

THE FASCIST OFFENSIVE

109

rible !”® When Mussolini heard the news, according to one report he sat
in granite silence for some moments, then hurled a heavy paperweight
through a picture frame. It is now, almost two years after the fact,
indisputable that neither Britain nor Italy — ^inconceivable as it seems —
was consulted or advised in advance.

(According to Pertinax, the French commentator, the French prime
minister and foreign minister saw Anthony Eden on his return from
Geneva in January, and said that diplomatic steps must be taken at once
if Austrian independence were to be saved. They implored him to com-
municate this view to Chamberlain, and promised French assistance in
the event that Austria should be attacked. But apparently it was too
late. Halifax had already indicated to Hitler that Great Britain was
not prepared to fight for Austria. Eden did his best, and then resigned.)

The correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini during the occu-
pation is illuminating. Hitler had just inflicted on his ally a stunning
diplomatic defeat — ^probably the worst in Mussolini’s whole career. So
his telegram was defensive, rather worried, and emphatic in its pledge
never to interfere with Mussolini’s own frontier, the Brenner.

'T have now decided to restore order and tranquillity in my country
(Austria) .... Do not see in this anything more than an act of legiti-
mate national defense, and therefore an action which any man of charac-
ter in my position would perform in the same way. At a critical hour
for Italy I demonstrated the strength of my sentiments to you. . . .
This decision (to respect the Brenner frontier) will never be touched or
questioned.”

Then Hitler made a little peroration :

*T did not take this decision (to acquire Austria) in the year 1938, but
immediately after the Great War. I have never made a mystery of it.”

The inflexible singleness of will of this man, his terrific cold fixity of
vision, who waits patiently for twenty years until his moment comes!

Mussolini’s reply could hardly have been colder :

'^My attitude is determined by the friendship between our two coun-
tries, which is consecrated in the Axis.”

Then Hitler telegraphed again — one can practically see him almost
weeping with relief — ^that he will "never forget” Mussolini’s answer.
**Ich werde Ihnen dieses nie vergessen/^ he proclaimed. Within six
weeks Mussolini had to receive Hitler in Rome for the return visit

® But he had had “prolonged discussions” with Ribbentrop on March 10. What
on earth did they talk about?

110

INSIDE EUROPE

which had been arranged in Munich the September before. The Due
couldn’t wriggle out of it, and welcomed the victorious Fuhrer with a
good grace as he could muster. (But Mussolini too, probably, knew tha
the merger of Germany and Austria was inevitable. . . .)

Death of Austria

So Austria perished The country which had more quality of grace
of cultivation and sophisticated charm, than any other in the world
succumbed to Nazi bootheels. Even the name perished. Austria became
a group of provinces known as ‘'Ostmark.” Vienna, the city of quiel
and skeptical laughter, the home of individualism, of worship of art and
the intellect, the wit of Schmtzler, the charm of Strauss, became a Ger-
man provincial town — gleichgeschaltet (coordinated) into the despotism,
the cultural aridity, the terrible uniformity of the Third Reich.

(But Austria was a German country — ^at least in race. Vienna was a
German city — ^at least in speech. Hitler was, as it were, coming home.)

When he stood on the bridgehead at Linz, on March twelfth, he an^
nounced that it was '*the greatest hour of his life.” It was not a great hour
in the lives of some hundreds of thousands of his countrymen.

Quick and merciless, the Brown Terror struck. By early summer, at
least fifty thousand of his countrymen were in jail,^ most of them
charged with no offense except the greatest — ^that of being enemies of
the Nazi regime. The dragnet knew no other categories. Jews of good
station were made to clean streets and toilets. Those arrested included
bankers like Louis Rothschild, ski teachers like Hannes Schneider,
physicians like Dr. Neumann, Catholic politicians like Dr. Ender, aris-
tocrats like Archduke Max Hohenberg. They included social democrats,
capitalists, Habsburgs, old Schutzbunders, Heimwehr Catholics, muni-
tions makers, Jews, communists.

Some few eminent Jews got out, like Professor Freud. Some seven
thousand of them did not get out, and committed suicide.

A few conspicuous political opponents of the Nazis disappeared early.
Baron Odo Neustaedter-Sturmer, it was announced, ‘‘committed sui-
cide.” He was the stalwart Heimwehr man who stood outside the
chancellery on July 25, 1934, and led the movement against the Nazi
raiders who had imprisoned and murdered Dollfuss inside.® Then — curi-
ous irony! — ^it was announced that Major Emil Fey, who was inside the

* According to Vincent Sheean in the New York Herald Tribune,

® See Chapter XXVI below.

THE FASCIST OFFENSIVE

111

building negotiating with the Nazis that same fateful day, had also
‘'committed suicide.” The Germans hated Neustaedter-Sturmer because
he opposed them, and Major Fey because, they said, he betrayed them.
So the three chief actors of the terrific spectacle of July 25 were united
at last — ^in death.

Fey’s wife was found dead by his side, and also his dog. The sar-
donicism of Viennese humor finds outlet in the darkest hours. "Dear
God,” one Viennese asked another, "do they shoot even dogsT* His
friend replied, "Ah, you do not apparently realize that the dog also
committed suicide.”

Seyss-Inquart, his role played, was quickly subordinated to Herr
Burckel, the pacifier of the Saar, who became Reichs commissioner for
Austria. A plebiscite was held in the usual manner, and the Nazis got
the usual vote. Hitler revealed that he had offered to stand alone against
Schuschnigg in an election — ^what a single combat on what a tourna-
ment field that jousting would have been! — ^and that now he stood in
Schuschnigg’s place, with the help of Providence which had destined
him for the job, because he was an abler man (which last is certainly
true). The murderers of Dollfuss, who performed one of the most
treacherous and cruel assassinations in history, were ennobled as mar-
tyrs and heroes — ^which caused even the London Times to protest. The
press was filled with lies about the former regime — ^which had its faults,
heaven knows— of the most flamboyant transparency. And General
Goering let one cat out of the bag when he justified the terror by saying
that Vienna, with 300,000 Jews, was not a "German” city — ^although
the whole pretext for Hitler’s twenty years’ campaign was Austria’s
Germanism.

All this being true, let us note on the other hand that the Nazis began
a campaign for the economic rehabilitation of Austria quite beyond the
powers of the former government. Road building and new factories were
pressed forward, slum clearance was advanced, new mines and hydro-
electric plants were announced, and the government took care to em-
phasize to the bewildered workers the socialist elements of National
Socialism.

A good many tears have been wept for poor Schuschnigg. And in-
deed his fate is lamentable. But one should not forget that he and Doll-
fuss (plus Mussolini) were responsible for the debacle which set the
whole earthslip moving — ^the suppression in blood of the Austrian social
democrats in February, 1934.

112

INSIDE EUROPE

Checking Up

Before proceeding to outline briefly the history of the German assault
on Czechoslovakia it is well to underline three factors, to emphasize
three important items that sometimes got lost in the shuffle of the most
prodigious crisis Europe has seen in modern times.

It is true that Czechoslovakia was a composite state. (True also that,
until the crisis, it was the strongest and stablest of the succession states ;
a peaceable state with high national intelligence ; a state not only with a
powerful and authentic national tradition but with a generous sense of
the needs of Europe as a whole; a state which was a pool of decency
and democracy in the turbulent regions beyond the Rhine, in fact the
only real democracy beyond the Rhine.) But the Czechs, it is unde-
niable, took more than their proper share in the Versailles settlements.
By the census of 1931 Czechoslovakia contained something like 10,-
000,000 Czechoslovaks, and in addition 3,231,688 Germans, 691,923
Hungarians, and 81,737 Poles,

The business of self-determination has its tricks and pitfalls. Rationally
if you believe in self-determination, and it is extremely difficult not to
believe in it, you have to concede that the German minority had as much
right to autonomy as the Czechoslovaks had to independence. But it was
not quite so simple as all that. The peace makers of Versailles were
greedy, but something more than greed is a controlling factor in the
story. No frontier can ever be drawn in Central or Eastern Europe
without leaving some minorities on the wrong side of the border. It is
geographically impossible to give self-determination to isolated enclaves
of people, remote from any frontier, without disrupting the state to
which they belong. The question of ultimate ends must be considered.
The nation itself has as much right to nationhood as the fractional
minorities have to autonomy — ^to put it mildly. You cannot follow the
practice of self-determination to its logical extreme without reaching an
absurdity — ^that of the state being sacrificed to its minorities. You can-
not liberate minorities if in doing so you sacrifice the possibility of the
free existence of the state itself. Thus the frontiers of the succession
states were drawn with military and strategic as well as purely ethno-
logical considerations in mind. Thus too the minority treaties were
established in 1919, guaranteeing that the new states with minorities
would not mistreat them.

THE FASCIST OFFENSIVE 113

So far so good. Let us proceed to three preliminary and important
points.

First, the German minority in Czechoslovakia was by and large better
treated than any other minority in Central Europe, infinitely better
treated for example — ^there is no comparison — than such a minority as
the Jews in Germany. The Serbs dragooned their Croats; the Ru-
manians crushed their Hungarians ; but the Czechoslovaks, certain small
stubborn tactlessnesses aside, treated the Sudeten Germans well. The
Sudetens had the right to use their own language, they had their own
schools. They were equal citizens in a free democracy; they were free
to enter politics and three Germans were cabinet ministers until the
crisis. From 1919 to 1933 they lived at peace with their Czech neighbors.
There were frictions and grievances, but utterly no secessionism until
Hitler came to power There was no ‘"Sudeten question” before 1933.
The Sudetens indeed did not even include autonomy in their program
till 1938.

Second, the German thesis that the Sudeten crisis was a movement to
liberate a downtrodden minority does not hold much water. It is pretext
to claim that Hitler wanted only to free Germans from non-German rule.
This was part of the story. But not all. There were German minorities in
Poland whom Hitler sacrificed without a qualm in order to hammer out
a pact with Poland which, when he was isolated, he desperately needed ;
he condemned the 350,000 good Germans in the South Tyrol to what
seemed permanent servitude, when he told Mussolini after the Austrian
coup that the Brenner frontier was eternal. These Tyrolean Germans
suffered infinitely more ignominiously than any Sudeten Germans ever
suffered. The very names on the gravestones of their ancestors were
erased. Hans Sachs became Giovanni Saccio.®

Third, the German press unendingly stated that the Sudeten area had
been torn from Germany by the peace treaties. This is pure fabrication.
The Sudeten area was never part of Germany. It has never been German
except in language. The Sudeten area was part of Austro-Hungary, not
of Germany, and the frontier between Germany and Czechoslovakia on
the north was one of the very few that the Versailles map makers did not
change. The boundary followed without alteration the historic line that
always divided the kingdom of Bohemia — since 1526 A.D. at any rate —
from Germany. The Czechoslovaks did get a few square miles of German

® In the summer of 1939 it was announced that the Tyrolese Germans would oc
moved back to Germany.

114 INSIDE EUROPE

soil in Silesia — a very few square miles indeed — ^but not one inch from
the Sudeten region.

The German point of view is simple and may be briefly put. The Reich,
an overwhelmingly powerful expansionist nation, demands its proper
privileges ; it demands the room that its military and political significance
rightly entail. If anyone suffers, it is hard luck. One can no more stand
in the way of the Reich, in its irresistible march to dominance of conti-
nental Europe, than one can turn the centuries backward. One can no
more deflect Hitler from his path than one can deflect an avalanche. The
whole sweep of modern history is with the Germans ; the modern histori-
cal process reaches its culmination in German reversal of the peace
treaties. Hitler is indubitably a great man and the Jews who have to wash
sidewalks are unfortunate victims of a cosmic explosion, forlorn by-
products of a civilization past use. Hitler is Germany’s revenge not merely
for Versailles but for Napoleon. Hitler is, in fact, the Napoleon of the
twentieth century.

'^Mortal Crisis Doth Portend an EndT

Events moved with dismaying swiftness and certitude after the sack
of Austria. I can no more than very briefly foreshorten them here. On
February 20, immediately before the Austrian adventure, Hitler re-
ferred to the Sudetens and assured them protection; on March 7 the
German Diplomatische Korrespondens, an official propaganda organ, sug-
gested autonomy for them. This was something quite new. Germany was
jumping in the Czechoslovak arena with both feet and in effect putting
forward the idea of dismemberment of the state. Quite properly, but with
great dignity and self-restraint, Prime Minister Milan Hodza of Czecho-
slovakia replied that Czechoslovakia must oppose any outside interference
in domestic affairs.

Already, trying to mend the situation, eager to forestall the storm, the
Czechs had made great concessions to the minorities. In February, 1937, a
year before, the government had made an agreement with all the German
minority parties, except Henlein’s group, promising them subsidies for
employment and public works, granting them jobs in the civil service in
proportion to their number, and extending the use of the German Ian*
guage instead of Czech in official communications. The Henlein group
rejected these concessions as inadequate. It must be clearly understood
that the extremist Henlein party was only one of several German parties
in Czechoslovakia. German clericals, German agrarians, German social

THE FASCIST OFFENSIVE

115

democrats, although good Germans, had no special fondness for the Nazis,
and were included in the Czechoslovak cabinet.

Konrad Henlein, the Sudeten leader, a puffy-faced sub-Hitler in his
early forties, was first a bank clerk, then a g3minasium instructor. By
1930 he was head of the German Turnverein, or gymnastic association, in
Czechoslovakia, and he turned to politics. Hitler's rise to dictatorship in
Germany enormously stimulated his movement. But at the beginning at
least he always stated unequivocally that he was a loyal subject of the
Czechoslovak state, working merely for the improvement of the German
minority within the country, and as late as 1936 he still asserted that he
was not a Nazi, but a convinced democrat. In 1933 he had said :

'^The welfare of the Sudetens is indissolubly bound up with the welfare
of the Czechoslovak republic. We stand in principle and unanimously for
loyalty to the state. For more than a thousand years Germans and Czechs
have lived together in these lands, and always their fate has been com-
mon. . . . We feel too vividly the power of historical tradition to con-
sider seriously any kind of territorial revision (Italics mine )

Five years later he was to change his mind. Rather Herr Hitler (with
certain aid from the British) changed it for him — ^with a vengeance.

By mid-March, 1938, it was clearly obvious that the Germans were
going to do something about — or to — Czechoslovakia, without much delay,
Prague stiffened. The French government in an absolutely categorical
declaration promised on March 14 that it would fulfill its treaty obliga-
tions to assist Czechoslovakia if it were invaded; so did the Russians,
though — an important detail — ^the shrewd Litvinov had so written the
treaty between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union that the Russians
were obligated to march only if the French marched first. Even Mr.
Chamberlain in London seemed alarmed ; on March 24 he issued a state-
ment that did not give any explicit British pledge of the Czechoslovak
frontiers, but which warned Germany that if war broke out it might be
impossible to localize it.

Germany receded a step. Marshal Goering stated that Hitler wanted to
^'improve" Czecho-German relations — ^ghastly joke this seems now!
Within Czechoslovakia the non-Henlein Germans, however, began to
desert the sinking ship. The representatives in the Prague cabinet of the
three non-Henlein German parties resigned. Some of their followers
merged with Henlein, which made his party the largest in the country.
Henlein, still theoretically standing for the ‘'territorial integrity of
Czechoslovakia," demanded a general election. The Prague government

INSIDE EUROPE

116

announced as a conciliatory measure that it would substantially enlarge
its program of concessions as outlined in February, 1937 by making a
totally new ‘‘Nationalities Statute,’' which, it became known later,
amounted virtually to redrawing the constitution of the state in favor
of the minorities.

April was an angry month. Give a Nazi an inch; he takes 20 miles.
Dr. Benes pleaded for harmony with Germany ; Daladier in London again
gave complete assurance that France would, in the event of war, come
to Czechoslovak aid. (This assurance was once more repeated by M.
Bonnet on May 21 ; the record of French repudiation of promises and
funk is almost beyond belief.) But harmony was not what the Nazis
wanted. A blasting campaign against the Czechs began in the German
newspapers — officially controlled of course — 3. campaign as noteworthy
for falsehood as for ferocity. On April 22 the Czechoslovak government
raised the ban on public meetings and promised elections in May in
11,000 communities. On the very next day, April 23, answering this
retort courteous with a smash to the nose, Henlein announced his 8-point
^‘Karlsbad” demands.

These had best be given in full :

1. Equality of Sudeten Germans and Czechs with the Sudeten Germans
no longer to be considered merely a minority.

2. Recognition of the Sudeten Germans as a legal and corporate body.

3. Determination of the Sudeten boundaries within the state.

4. Full self-government for the Germans in this demarcated territory.

5. Legal protection and guarantees for Germans living in Czechoslovakia
outside this demarcated belt.

6. Removal of “injustices” and discriminations against Germans, in the
matter of language, jobs, and the like, inflicted since 1918, and repara^
Hon for them,

7. State and civil employees and officials in German areas to be Germans.

8. The Germans to have full liberty to profess German nationality and to
proclaim allegiance to the ideology of Germany, i.e., Nazidom.

A state which accepted these eight demands would have ceased to be a
state. These extraordinary points at least cleared the air. They proved
one thing beyond doubt, namely that the Sudetens did not want a settle-
ment, since the demands were utterly impossible from any workable or
practical point of view, if Czechoslovakia was to survive. Yet the Czecho-
slovak government did not immediately reject them ; it simply indicated
that the request that Czechoslovakia change its foreign policy was un-
reasonable, and that it could not grant its citizens the right to profes*

THE FASCIST OFFENSIVE

117

allegiance to another country. The demands were proof that Henlein had
given up any thought of a normal solution by negotiation. But Dr. Benes
continued to urge a settlement. Instantly Henlein countered with a state-
ment that the Karlsbad program did not embody his ^‘maximum"'
demands !

In May came crisis. Stormingly the Sudetens began their election cam-
paign. They complained that they were crushed and suppressed ; yet they
were allowed to make speeches freely! They asserted that they were
victims of ‘'political terrorism” ; but they were allowed free expression of
their beliefs in a free election 1 The farce passed beyond reason.

It passed beyond peace, too — almost. Two Sudetens were killed in a
frontier brawl on the eve of the May 22 elections. The weekend very
nearly brought war. Henlein saw Hitler on the 19th. German troops
massed at the border, and there was every indication that the Germans
planned a Blitzkrieg, lightning war, to destroy Czechoslovakia before
the powers could — ^if they would — intervene. But with great promptness
and energy the Czechs met the threat by a partial mobilization. The
frontiers were manned, and several hundred thousand reservists called
up. So Hitler receded again, and the crisis continued to grind on.*^

The Czech government met the Sudetens at a Round Table Conference
in June. Four different plans were prepared to meet the Sudeten ulti-
matum during the summer, even though Henlein had refused to negotiate
on the basis of the new Nationalities Statute — ^until “peace and order”
were restored 1 In other words, the bandit refused to talk with the police-
man, until the policeman consented to stop committing “crimes.” The
fourth Czech plan, hammered out with infinite patience in circumstances
of almost inconceivable difficulty, when every concession could be inter-
preted as a surrender to blackmail, and was instantly followed by more
and more brutal Nazi pressure, performed the miracle of almost meeting
the Karlsbad program. The Germans and other minorities were promised
local autonomy, and were given quasi-independent status within the state.
Czechoslovakia was to be cantonized, like Switzerland ; the Czech cabinet
was to include “bureaus” representing each minority; the police and
gendarmes in the minority districts were to be turned over to the minori-
ties themselves.

Finally, new laws to govern this procedure were to be drawn up by a
commission consisting equally of representatives of the government and

^ As a result of having been frustrated by this May crisis, Hitler decided to build
the Siegfried line of German fortifications in the west

INSIDE EUROPE

118

the Sudetens. Conciliation could go no further. But it was no use. A trivial
incident on the frontier, when a Sudeten deputy was slapped by an
angry officer— the German headlines read '"SAVAGE HORSEWHIP-
PING BY BESTIAL CZECH*'— broke off negotiations. They were
half-heartedly resumed, but it was doubly clear by this time that a peace-
ful settlement was impossible. Already, after a violently agitated August,
it was September.

Meantime Lord Runciman had come to Prague as an official adviser
and mediator. To date it is difficult to assess accurately or in complete
detail the shocking role that Runciman seems to have played. Most of
the independent American newspaper correspondents in Prague assert
that he seemingly favored the Sudeten case almost from the beginning.
His report at any rate went far beyond anything that even Henlein or
Hitler had dared openly to talk about — ^actual dismemberment of the
Czechoslovak state. The London Times, at a crucial juncture, also ap-
peared with an important editorial advocating rectification of the frontier,
and territorial cession of the Sudeten area to Germany. Obviously these
events greatly strengthened Hitler's hand.

September is the month of the Nazi congress at Nuremberg. It met in
the tumultuous shadow of impending war. Germany was mobilized —
though the operation was masked with the term "maneuvers" — ^with
1,300,000 men at arms. Europe paused, tense, to hear the Fuhrer. He
outdid himself on September 9 with a surly and bombastic speech, full of
the smoke and thunder of defiance. He refused to believe that negotia-
tions could bring a settlement; he said that Germany would capitulate to
no one. Germany roared ; the Czechs waited ; Europe quivered ; and Mr.
Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden. But he did not fly there to save the
Czechs; he flew there to prevent a war.

War didn't come. War was to be averted for another year. What
came instead was — Munich.

Chapter IX

From Munich to Warsaw

^^The heart of Poland hath not ceased
To quiver, tho’ her sacred blood doth drown
The fields . .

— Tennyson

VyyHEN Mr. Chamberlain took off at Heston airdrome in the
” early morning of September 15, 1938, to visit that well known
Austrian house-painter, somnambulist, and sub-Napoleon, Adolf Hitler,
in his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, Europe knew at last, after
almost twenty years of armistice, that the real crisis had come. Previ-
ously there had been other crises. When France invaded the Ruhr, when
Germany invaded the Rhineland, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, when
Hitler invaded Austria, the press of the world pronounced in flaming
headlines that the '^greatest’’ event since 1914 had arrived. But these
other crises were child’s play compared to the Czechoslovak crisis which
Mr. Chamberlain was attempting to overcome. This was the real thing —
war or peace — at last.

Two weeks followed of sound and fury, of agonized suspense and
almost intolerable tension. The world listened with ears glued to broad-
casts from London and Prague, Berlin and Rome. Europe tottered on
the brink, anguished and terror-struck. The monstrous war machines
plunged stertorously toward action. A war that might easily destroy what
was left of European civilization seemed starkly, unbelievably inevitable.
The French manned the Maginot line, and the British fleet went into
the North Sea prepared for action. Only Italy and Soviet Russia of the
great powers did not mobilize. One small incident dramatized the alarm
of the world as well as any other : the great German steamship ^'Europa/'
jammed with Americans fleeing Europe, turned about in mid-ocean^
recalled by radio to home waters. It seemed as if Europe as well as
the ‘‘Europa” named for Europe was going back, back, back — ^no one
knew whither.

120

INSIDE EUROPE

And this all happened in a year during which Herr Hitler had promised
that the ‘'era of surprises’’ in German foreign policy was over !

Mr. Masefield, the poet laureate, expressed pungently the relief that
most of the world felt when it became known that Chamberlain was going
to Hitler ;

As Priam to Achilles for his son,

So you, into the night, divinely led.

To ask that young men’s bodies, not yet dead.

Be given from the battle not begun.

The controlling, the dominant factor of the crisis was fear, fear of war,
fear of air raids in great cities, fear that London and Paris might meet
the fate of Guernica and Barcelona, destroyed by German bombs. Fear,
funk, fear, paralyzed what the New Statesman calls the “demo-plutocra-
cies.” Fear, funk, fear, led Britain into such a humiliation as it had
hardly known for centuries, and France into the crudest repudiation of
presumably sacrosanct pledges that modern history can record. Fear,
funk, fear, accounted for the gross and sickening betrayal of the Czecho-
slovak nation, its assassination by its “friends.”

Hitler’s speech at Nuremberg on September 9 sounded the final phase of
the great struggle. He talked once more about the “shameless ill-treatment,
the violence and torture” (this last quite imaginary) undergone by the
Sudetens, and said flatly that Germany would not tolerate further oppres-
sion. He also asserted that Germany need no longer fear a blockade in
the event of war. The speech was a signal for violent disorder. Fighting
took place in the Sudeten areas, and was quickly crushed ; Henlein fled to
Germany and organized the Sudeten Free Corps there on German soil,
and the Czechs — at long last — declared martial law.

So the situation was worsening. Something had to be done quickly.
The British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson, ap-
parently found it impossible to talk to Hitler privately while the Nurem-
berg festival was proceeding. The British had sent several warnings to
Germany, but they were unheeded. When, in fact, in August Henderson
had appealed to Ribbentrop for moderation, Ribbentrop bluntly replied
that British eflforts for peace merely served to stiffen the Czechs. Sir
John Simon’s speech at Lanark, repeating a warning that Britain might
find it impossible to remain aloof in the event of war, merely annoyed
the Germans, Again a direct warning to Ribbentrop — “regarding the
probable attitude of His Majesty’s Government in the event of German

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW

121

aggression against Czechoslovakia, particularly if France were com-
pelled to intervene” — ^brought no reply. Germany thought England was
merely bluffing. It was imperative that Hitler himself be seen.

Chamberlain in his House of Commons speech on September 28 said :

‘‘One of the principal difficulties in dealing with a totalitarian govern-
ment is the lack of any means of establishing contact with the personali-
ties in whose hands lies the final decision.

‘T, therefore, resolved to go to Germany myself and interview Herr
Hitler and find out in a personal conversation whether there was any
hope yet of saving peace.

“I knew very well that in taking such an unprecedented course I was
laying myself open to criticism on the ground that I was detracting from
the dignity of the British Prime Minister, and to disappointment, even to
resentment, if I failed to bring back a satisfactory agreement.”

A word for Mr. Chamberlain. He has been bitterly, savagely attacked.
But his motive was completely simple and of the best : to avert war. He
was not, I think, so much pro-German as pro-Peace, if that is not a con-
tradiction in terms. He was convinced that Mussolini and Hitler were
permanent realities that had to be dealt with ; he thought that a peaceful
Europe was only possible by coming to terms with them. It is almost
unforgivable that he gave the Czechoslovaks themselves no chance to
negotiate ; but perhaps circumstances in the form of Herr Hitler and the
German air force permitted him no choice. He stood for peace and got
it — ^temporarily — only by making someone else pay a terrible price. But
in this course there is no doubt that the great mass of the British people —
the French people also — stood behind him. Finally, he was forced to
accept Hitler's terms because he was in no position to wage war. Both
Britain and France were — still — shockingly unprepared. Hitler had all
the cards — ^and guns — ^in his hands. Chamberlain had to make any con-
cession, no matter how drastic, because if the war had come then, Eng-
land and France might have been beaten.

The spectacular drama of the flight of this 69 year old merchant from
the Midlands to see Hitler on his mountain top was only exceeded by the
spectacular quality of the “settlement” he made. He found at once that
the only solution was the cession of Czechoslovak territory to Germany.^

^ Lord Runciman had come to the same conclusion, though his report exonerated
the Czechs of the ridiculous charges of ‘‘terrorism,” put the responsibility of the
final break on Henlein, and asserted that agreement might have been reached on
the basis of the Karlsbad demands. It is obscure when, precisely, Lord Runciman
decided that dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was necessary The whole question

122

INSIDE EUROPE

The Germans were willing to risk a world war to get the Sudeten area.
Chamberlain returned to London, where MM. Daladier and Bonnet met
him. British and French cabinets wrestled with the details over the
week-end of the i8th — ^very few authentic details were permitted to leak
out — ^and finally accepted Hitler^s terms. A horrified world listened to
the projected lines of settlement:

1. Czechoslovakia to cede to the Reich outright all territory containing
more than 50 per cent of Germans. (This territory included the moun-
tainous barrier which was the nation's first and essential defense, as
well as its tremendous fortification system and most of the key in-
dustries.)

2. Plebiscites in other German districts.

3. Czechoslovakia to give up her French and Russian pacts, and be
“neutralized."

4. Britain and France to guarantee Czechoslovakia's new abbreviated
frontiers.

When M Oususky, the Czechoslovak minister in Paris, heard the
terms, he burst into tears crying, “Do you want to see a man convicted
without a hearing? Here I stand!"

The comment of Leon Blum of France was revelatory: “War has
probably been averted, but I feel myself divided between cowardly relief
and my sense of shame." A great many people in many countries shared
this sentiment.

The terms were presented to Prague. Despair struck Czechoslovakia.
On the 20th the Czechs replied with an offer to submit the matter to
the Hague Court under terms of the 1925 treaty of conciliation between
Germany and Czechoslovakia. This treaty was not, as has been said, a
forgotten document disinterred for the occasion; actually in March, 1938
General Goering had referred to it as the proper basis for peaceful rela-
tions between the two countries 1 On the 21st Britain and France exerted
pressure on Prague in the most urgent manner. If Czechoslovakia did
not submit, they said coldly that they would leave it to its fate. If it did
not accept partition, the terms of which were close to suicide, the German
invasion would take place and the nation would be obliterated. It was a
choice between self-amputation and murder. At 2:15 A.M. the French
and British ministers were received by Dr. Benes. In circumstances of

of his report demands elucidation For instance it was dated September 21, six
whole days after Chamberlain’s first visit to Hitler. Perhaps there was no time, but
surely the report, which was to have been the basis for a settlement, should have
preceded the negotiations, not followed them.

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW 123

unparalleled tragedy and strain the Czech cabinet stayed in session till
9:00 A.M., accepted the demands, and then resigned. A new cabinet
under the one-eyed war hero General Syrovy was formed. And Europe
relaxed — a little.

The Czech submission was in language that did the nation honor.
Without rancor, without recrimination, with dignity and courage, but
making it clear that they were submitting to extraordinary pressure,
the Czechs gave up a great deal of their country for the sake of Euro-
pean peace:

‘‘The government is determined to maintain peace and order and inde-
pendence under the new conditions that confront it. The President of
the Republic and the government could do nothing but accept the sug-
gestions of the two powers . . . Nothing else remained, because we
were alone . . .

“We will defend freedom, self-sufficiency, and independence under the
new conditions . . . Farmers, workers, industrialists, employers, sol-
diers, all remain at your posts and do your duty ... No violence or
demonstrations on the streets . . . Remain firm to your faith in your
republic.’’

Chamberlain said — ^he could hardly have said less — ^that the British
government “was profoundly conscious of the immense sacrifice which
the Czechoslovak government had agreed to and the immense public
spirit it had shown.”

Winston Churchill said, “The idea that you can purchase safety by
throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”

At the time of the Czech acceptance a vast wave of relief, tinged with
some sentiment of dismay, swept most people. War had been averted.
The settlement was cruel, but it was not dishonorable. It seemed that self-
determination for the Germans was a defensible proposition, even though
it was accompanied by threat of force ; it seemed that the Czechoslovaks
had added a new note to history, a new definition of national honor, by
consenting to a sacrifice which might be for the good of Europe as a
whole. Chamberlain was praised for his courage, and Benes for his un-
selfishness and nobility.

But much worse was to come. The first settlement at Berchtesgaden
was only the beginning.

*'Peace in Our Time**

On Thursday, September 22, Chamberlain returned to Germany to
meet Hitler at Godesberg, a spa on the Rhine. He brought with him

124

INSIDE EUROPE

Czech acceptance. He thought the crisis was over. Instead he was directly
confronted with new demands, and not only new demands, but a time
limit, an ultimatum, before which they must be accepted. The new de-
mands were worse than blackmail. They were staggering.

It all must have seemed easy to Hitler. The Czechs had been forced
to accept his first demands. This meant in his view that the British and
the French could be prevailed upon to exert pressure on them to accept
even further demands. He had got something for nothing. Why not grab
more ? Mr. Chamberlain, in his House of Commons speech, quotes Hitler
as saying ''that he never for one moment supposed that I (Chamberlain)
should be able to come back and say that the principle (self-determina-
tion, i.e., territorial dismemberment) had been accepted.’’ What a cat out
of what a bag ! Hitler never thought that Britain would accept even his
first demands !

Chamberlain was thunderstruck. He listened to Hitler on the 22nd,
then sulked on his side of the Rhine till evening of the 23rd, just before
his departure. Meanwhile notes were exchanged. The new German de-
mands were in text and manner those that a victorious enemy humiliat-
ingly extends to a vanquished foe. And indeed Czechoslovakia was a van-
quished foe. The Godesberg ultimatum, expiring October i (whereas
the Berchtesgaden agreement allowed several months for fixing the new
frontiers), extended by at least a thousand square miles the territory
Germany was to take; it crippled Czechoslovakia irremediably by cut-
ting the nation virtually in two ; it allowed only eight days for the removal
of Czechoslovaks who did not want to live in Germany (whereas the
Treaty of Versailles had given three years to Germans in Czechoslovakia
who wished to opt for German citizenship) ; it made no provision for
consideration of minorities in the plebiscite areas ; it demanded that the
Czechs, in the surrendered territory, give up all rolling stock, munitions,
freight installations, utility services, radio services, foodstuffs, cattle,
goods, and raw materials. In other words, Czechs or non-Nazi Germans
fleeing from the new German areas would have to flee — ^within eight
days — ^utterly destitute.

Chamberlain says:

"I declared that the language and manner of the document, which I
described as an ultimatum rather than a memorandum, would pro-
foundly shock public opinion in neutral countries and I bitterly re-
proached the German Chancellor for his failure to respond in any way
to the efforts which I had made to secure peace.”

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW

125

He then adds :

^Tn spite of those frank words, this conversation was carried out in
more friendly terms than that which preceded it.”

Wonderful giveaway! Talk sharply to Herr Hitler, and he becomes
more friendly.

At this time Hitler repeated to Chamberlain that the Germans had no
further territorial aims in Europe once the Sudeten area was acquired.
Chamberlain believed him. Quaint it seems now.

Why, with the Sudeten Germans in his lap, did Hitler break the crisis
open again ? He must have known that his second demands entailed some
risk. He was risking what he had always asserted to be his object, and
which he had already obtained — the promise of the incorporation of the
Sudetens in the Reich — for a further object. In other words, his argu-
ment on the basis of self-determination, if not in itself fraudulent, was
certainly a pretext for something else.

The something else was, of course, as we know now, power in Europe.
The ultimate object was not merely the Sudeten area, but destruction of
democratic Czechoslovakia as a barrier in his path. Power to break the
Franco-Soviet pact, power to isolate and impenetrate Poland and the
Balkan states, power to rule Europe east of the Rhine — ^that is what
Hitler wanted. ‘The master of Bohemia,” Bismarck said once, “is the
master of the continent.” That mastery was Hitler's object.^

As Chamberlain flew back to London from Godesberg, two things
continued to happen. One was a provocatively vicious, vulgar, inflam-
matory, and untruthful assault by the united (and officially controlled)
German press on Czechoslovakia — ^together with complete suppression
of any news that Germany did not like.

The other was the presentation of demands by Poland and Hungary
for Czechoslovak territory. The jackals of Warsaw and Budapest rose
from their caves and followed the German lion to the feast. Their
whine unpleasantly exacerbated the crisis. Poland certainly had a legiti-
mate claim to Teschen, and Himgary certainly lost too much territory
by the Trianon treaty, but minority assertions by either Poland or

2 When I first wrote this chapter on October 5, 1938, I included at this point the
following paragraph • “As to Hitler^s promise that he does not wish more territory,
one can only say that his lies have been notorious. Like Napoleon, he breaks his
word any time that dishonesty is politically convenient. He promised to respect the
Treaty of Locarno ; and violated it He promised not to fortify the Rhineland ; and
fortified it He promised not to annex Austria; and annexed it. He promised not
to invade Czechoslovakia ; and invaded it.”

126

INSIDE EUROPE

Hungary had their humors, to say the least. Hungary oppressed the
Slovaks and Transylvanian Rumanians for generations. Poland was a
composite state precisely as was Czechoslovakia, with almost 10,000,000
non-Poles m a total population of 33,000,000.

On Sunday the 25th, Daladier and Bonnet again came to London.
The Czechs, convinced now that they must perish fighting, mobilized;
word had gone from Chamberlain to Prague that in view of the Godes-
berg demands the Czechs had best prepare themselves. The entire nation
rose to arms. The French decided that the new German proposals were
unacceptable ; so did the Czechs. And a highly important Anglo-French
communique was issued to the effect that, if Germany invaded Czecho-
slovakia, “the immediate result must be that France will be bound to
come to her assistance and Great Britain and Russia will certainly stand
by France.” So finally the British, in finally unmistakable terms, did
commit themselves — ^and Russia! — to the defense of Czechoslovakia.
The French and Belgians mobilized; London got ready for Goering’s
raiders. Gas masks were distributed, and men frantically dug trenches in
Hyde Park.

The result was what might have been expected. Hitler in his speech at
the Sport-Palast the next day receded — not much — but he did recede.
He assaulted Dr. Benes and the Czechoslovaks vigorously, but he did
not close the door forever. That night President Roosevelt made his first
dramatic appeal for peace, and on Tuesday, September 27, Chamberlain
addressed the world by radio in a brief grave speech, saying that he
would labor for peace to the end, but that Britain would have to fight if
*^any nation made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of force.”

Chamberlain’s most trusted adviser. Sir Horace Wilson, was shuttling
by air between London and Berlin. Mr. Roosevelt sent a second appeal
to Hitler, which like the first was not even printed in Germany and to
which the answer was a curt statement that further correspondence would
not be useful. Hitler, playing his hand with wonderful skill, pressing hard
now, let it be known that he changed his ultimatum from October i
(which first date had been disclosed not by Hitler but by Mussolini) to
2 P.M. on the 28th. Then, on Mussolini’s intervention, it was advanced
twenty-four hours till the 29th. Time was almost up. Gas masks were
fitted in Buckingham Palace.

On the 28th Chamberlain addressed the House of Commons in what
was certainly the most momentous session since August, 1914. Chamber-
lain told as much of the story as he could, and was reaching his peroration

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW

127

with an account of the last desperate maneuvers. Hitler had assured Sir
Horace Wilson that his troops would only occupy the Sudeten areas;
Chamberlain wrote Hitler once more imploring him not to precipitate
a world catastrophe when agreement in principle had already been estab-
lished; he also revealed that he had urgently written Mussolini asking
him to stay Hitler’s hand.

Then a messenger arrived in the House of Commons. Chamberlain
looked at the piece of paper. He announced :

‘T have something further to tell the House. I have now been in-
formed by Herr Hitler that he invites me to meet him in Munich
tomorrow morning. He has also invited Signor Mussolini and M.
Daladier. Signor Mussolini has accepted and I have no doubt that
M. Daladier will also accept. The House will not need to ask what my
answer will be.”

The four leaders met at Munich on September 29 and whittled out
an agreement. No Czechoslovak representative was permitted to take part
in the deliberations; a Czechoslovak emissary was, in fact, shown the
door. It was agreed that Germany begin occupation of four Sudeten
districts on October i, that the Czechs must not remove any ''installa-
tions,” that an international commission should decide future regions
for plebiscites, and that Germany and Italy should join Britain and
France in a guaranty of the new frontiers. So in nine hours of talk four
men accomplished the dismemberment of a nation.

Chamberlain additionally signed a short bilateral pact with Hitler —
apparently without consulting the Foreign Office or the Dominions, who
ordinarily are informed about any such important diplomatic step —
asserting that the Munic]? agreement was "symbolic of the desire of our
two peoples never to go to war with one another again,” and pledging
the signatories to "the method of consultation” in dealing with ques-
tions concerning the two countries. So Hitler’s victory seemed complete.
And when Chamberlain returned to London, he said, "It is peace in our
time.”

On October i the German troops duly began their victorious occupa-
tion of Czechoslovakia.® By October 5 it was clear that they did not
intend to stop at the lines originally drawn. On October 6 Dr. Benes
resigned. No man ever had a more cruel trial, or sought to render
greater service to his country.

® When Hitler entered Karlsbad he said astoundmgly, *1 always knew that some
day I would stand here, but I never knew how it would come about.”

128

INSIDE EUROPE

Aftermath of Munich

In a day or two Europe awoke as if shattered by a nightmare. Every-
one, dazed, sought to trace just what had happened ; and a few prescient
folk wondered if it could possibly have been as bad as the nightmare
seemed. It was. Germany had won the greatest diplomatic victory of
the century. Czechoslovakia was in essence destroyed, and the Little
Entente collapsed. Disillusion with the democracies smote Russia
sharply, and France — it seemed — ^became a second-rate power. The
entire European system of security was burst asunder. Even in Britain
there were dark forebodings. For British foreign policy had for three
hundred years depended on the balance of power, a theory which in
turn depends on the presumption that no single country on the con-
tinent is too powerful. After Munich, Germany became overwhelmingly
the strongest power in Europe. The British decided that they had better
hurry on with their exhausting arms program — ^after all.

Yet many well-informed Europeans thought that a chance, a slim but
infinitely precious chance, remained that Munich might bring — ^not war —
but real peace. Germany, they said, must obviously play its proper role
in Europe. One cannot go from generation to generation knocking
Germans on the head and waiting for them to rise again, in order to
knock them on the head once more. The Germans are a courageous,
an industrious, a supremely patriotic people, indispensable to the unity
and well being of Europe. The German problem, that of a powerful
expansionist state in the heart of the continent, must be solved some-
how if Europe is to survive at all. And so it was said, with stilled
and hopeful breath, *Tf only, if only Hitler keeps his word this time, if
only he will rest content with this immense victory and foreswear further
adventures, it is possible — ^just possible — ^that peace will come.”

But Hitler didn't keep his word. Within six months, he had absorbed
the rest of Czechoslovakia. Within a year, he made war on Poland.

End of Czechoslovakia

Almost at once it became clear that Germany, in dealing with Czecho-
slovakia, was not going to abide by the Munich settlement. First, the
promise that plebiscites would be held in the border areas was dropped ;
second, the projected Anglo-French guaranty of the new frontiers never
materialized. The Germans insisted on using the 1910 census as a cri-
terion for deciding who was Czech and who was German. As a result,

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW

129

some 800,000 pure Czechs found themselves assigned to Germany;
some areas with less than ten per cent German population — ^by con-
temporary statistics — were severed from Czechoslovakia and surren-
dered to the Reich. All in all, Czechoslovakia lost some 19,000 square
miles out of roughly 54,000; it lost 4,922,440 inhabitants out of roughly
15,000,000. Of these, 3,600,000 went to Germany, about 1,000,000 to
Hungary, and about 240,000 — ^in the Teschen area — ^to Poland.

Meantime a shaky and almost powerless government, terrified by the
Nazis, sought to rule in Prague. Nothing except complete pro-Germanism
was possible to any surviving Czech politician — ^if he wished to survive.
By November a pro-German ‘^nationar* party was formed and a Su-
preme Court judge named Hacha became president of the republic.
Also in November the Slovaks and Ruthenes were “given** virtual au-
tonomy, with Germany of course pulling the strings; the way was
thus prepared for the final conquest. “Czechoslovakia** shriveled in ef-
fect to the two central districts of Bohemia and Moravia. Here too Ger-
man power was potentially absolute. The Germans, by pushing a button,
could turn off all Prague’s electric light and water power. Then — ^as
if this were not enough — ^the Germans announced their intention of
building an extraterritorial highway straight across Czechoslovakia,
linking the Reich proper with Vienna.

Crisis came in March. It is a very complex story about which it is
still too early to write with authority. We know something; we do not
know all. In Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, a cabinet crisis was pro-
voked by Slovak separatists. Dr. Tiso, the pro-German prime minister,
was forced out; immediately he left for Berlin, accompanied by the
German consul-general (this was on March 13), where he was re-
ceived by Hitler. The government in Prague, under President Hacha,
was desperately trying to retain some tiny fragment of Czech national
dignity and independence. It could not allow the Slovaks to secede from
what remained of the republic without at least protesting. But the protest
was unavailing. Germany stepped in — full-force and full-weight — on the
Slovak side. With greased wheels the propaganda machine, so well
trained on the Austrian and Sudeten crises, went into action. There
were the usual stories — ^all quite untrue — of disorder, violence, and
murder by Czechs against Germans. On March 14 — ^the crisis came
to a head very quickly indeed — Hitler peremptorily summoned Presi-
dent Hacha and his foreign minister. Dr. Chvalkovsky, to Berlin,

Hacha was the Czech Schuschnigg. He was treated better than

130

INSIDE EUROPE

Schuschnigg. But the result was the same. Only the pace was faster. He
arrived in Berlin at 10.40 P.M. on the 14th, and was received at i.oo
A.M. At 4.15 he broke down, and signed the independence of his country
away. Hitler and Goering broke him down. Once he fainted. Alarmed,
fearing he might die of heart failure, Goering gave him a stimulant. He
fainted again. He read what he had signed, ‘The Czechoslovak presi-
dent . . . trustfully lays the fate of the Czech people and country into
the hands of the Fuhrer of the German Reich.’’

Already German troops were in motion. They had started across
the frontier, in fact, and occupied towns like Moravska-Ostrava and
Vitkovice, on the 14th before Hacha arrived in Berlin. The Reichs-
wehr machine moved with oiled and beautiful precision. No resistance
came from stunned Prague. All of Czechoslovakia except Ruthenia
(which the Hungarians took) was occupied smoothly and at once.
Sullen, silent, the Czech crowds watched the Germans enter. Germans
had not been in Prague since 1648. That night — ^the same incredible
March 15 — Hitler slept in the Prague palace of the old Bohemian kings.

Bohemia-Moravia was at once transformed into a protectorate;
Slovakia became in theory “autonomous” with its political “independ-
ence” guaranteed under German guidance. Tiso was rewarded by the
Slovak premiership; rather surprisingly, Hacha was permitted to re-
main in the Bohemia-Moravia “presidency,” though atop him — ^now — •
was the new Reichs “Protector,” Baron von Neurath. Thus Czecho-
slovakia disappeared.

Of all European coups this century, this probably was the most
astonishing, both for its celerity and for the vast political implications it
evoked. This was something new — even for Hitler. This was something
not written in his program. This was something not in Mein Kampf,
Hitler did not merely, in the most glaring manner, violate all his
Munich pledges to Chamberlain (where was that Anglo-German under-
standing to “consult” that Mr. Chamberlain had been so proud of ?) ; he
violated every promise he had ever made to his own people and to his
own destiny. If Hitler stood for anything, it was the integrity of Ger-
man race. Over and over again, he had proclaimed that only Germans
interested him. Yet here he was, calmly acquiring some seven million
Czechs. Here he was, a conqueror of the old school, with all doctrines
of self-determination, pan-Germanism, racism, tossed overboard. He
said at Munich he had no more territorial claims in Europe. Yet here
he was — ^with a non-German country in his bag !

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW

131

Hitler’s explanation was embodied in his first proclamation estab-
lishing the protectorate : ‘‘Bohemia and Moravia have for thousands of
years belonged to the Lebensraum of the German people. Force and
unreason have arbitrarily torn them from their old historical setting
. . . Sooner or later the Reich, as historically and geographically the
power most interested in the region, would have to bear the heaviest
consequences. It is in accordance, therefore, with the principles of self-
preservation (italics mine) that the Reich is resolved to intervene . .
Thus the new slogan, Lebensraum (living space) was born. Thus too
self-determination became transformed into self-preservation. The next
motto followed soon — “encirclement.”^

German troops entering Czechoslovakia were armed with a German-
Czech phrase book, according to the New York Times, Excerpts:

If you he you will be shot.

Are the inhabitants peaceful?

It is punishable by death, first, to go near the railway ; second, to use
the telephone.

Are you the mayor? Open all the cupboards. Where is the safe? How
much money is in it? I confiscate the money.

As if still in the stride of this staggering coup, with his left hand
as it were. Hitler reached out on March 22 and took Memel from Lith-
uania. He was intoxicated with success. But the Czech adventure, the
obliteration of the Czechoslovak state, may not turn out to be a Hitler
victory. He announced himself after March as the Mehrer (Aggran-
dizer) of the German Reich; it is not a title that becomes him. The
March crisis can, in fact, be interpreted as a defeat of the first magni-
tude for Hitler. In one sense it was not a victory at all ; it was his first
great historical mistake. Because it brought the British into line against
him.

The Polish Crisis Begins

“No one in Germany thinks of going to war with Poland over the Corridor.**

— Hitler in 1933.

I cannot propose in this book to deal with the Polish crisis compre-
hensively. To do so would necessitate whole chapters, if not volumes.
This book does not, after all, pretend to be a detailed history. I can

^ As if as a sop to the racial theory, the laws of the protectorate, announced on
March 16, differentiate between classes of citizens. Pure Germans become German
nationals, “for the protection of German blood and honor,” while Czechs become
merely citizens of the protectorate.

132 INSIDE EUROPE

sketch only highlights. It is still too early to write the final, definitive
story.

Within a week of the acquisition of Bohemia-Moravia, on March 21
in fact, six days later. Hitler opened his great diplomatic offensive against
Poland. He was supremely confident. He revealed, speaking to the
Reichstag on March 28, that he had made certain ^'proposals’’ to the
Polish government. First, Danzig should, as a Free City, return to the
Reich. Second, Germany should receive a combined road and railway
across the Corridor, with extraterritorial status: in other words, a
German "corridor across the corridor.” Third, Germany would recog-
nize the Polish frontier as final and guarantee it for 25 years. The Poles
replied to this offer with a cautious and provisional negative. Presum-
ably they assumed that a period of bargaining was to begin. They re-
plied — on March 26 — ^that they were quite willing to discuss "objectively”
the German points, but that before discussion could start they must be
assured, first, of Germany’s peaceable intentions, second that Germany
would adopt only peaceful methods of procedure.

Meantime the events of March 15 had been a staggering shock to
Chamberlain and the great bulk of British opinion. The prime minister,
bitterly disillusioned — ^with Munich down the chute and the whole
"appeasement” policy in ruins — ^rebuked the Germans. "Is this the end
of an old adventure,” he asked, "or the beginning of a new? Is this
the last attack upon a small state, or is it to be followed by others?”
With alacrity the British set about mending fences. Poland — ^it was
obvious — ^was going to be the next victim. The British, not out of dis-
interested regard for the Poles, but because they now realized that Hit-
ler could not be truthful and that his march to European dominance
was a vital threat to their most vital interests, determined to support
Poland. On March 31 Chamberlain announced terms of a British and
French guarantee to the Poles as follows :

"In order to make perfectly clear the position of His Majesty’s
Government ... I have now to inform the House that ... in the event
of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which
the Polish government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their
national forces. His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound
at once to lend the Polish Government all the support in their power.
They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect.”

As Chamberlain himself said on April 3, this unprecedented and
sensational pledge marked a "new epoch” in British foreign policy. The

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW

133

British frontier became the Vistula. For the first time in history, Britain
promised to support an eastern European power. For the first time in
history, Britain pledged itself to fight for a European state other than
France or Belgium. The pledge was badly drafted. It gave the Poles vir-
tually a blank check. It did not specify frontiers. It was not, for a time,
clear whether Danzig was or was not included in the pledge. It did not
mention the putative aggressor — ^with the result, that when Russia in-
vaded Poland (the British of course had had only Germany in mind), it
seemed that the British were committed to go to war against the Soviet
Union. Above all, the pledge did not take account of concrete realities —
how the British were going to support Poland, how help could possibly
be rendered Poland “at once.”

Hitler’s answer was sharp. On April 28 the Germans denounced both
their famous non-aggression pact with Poland, which had regularized
German-Polish relations on a peaceful basis since 1934, and the Anglo-
German naval agreement, which had been such a feather in Ribben-
trop’s first cap. The British then proceeded to extend their eastern Euro-
pean guarantees to Rumania, Turkey, and Greece, including financial
assistance. This was locking the stable doors with a vengeance — ^after
the Austrian and Czechoslovak horses had been hamstrung and kid-
napped.

At about this time entered another inordinately important factor —
Anglo-French relations with the Soviet Union.

It must have been obvious to a moron, a child, or even an archbishop
that Poland was impossible of effective defense without Russian help.
And at first it seemed that Russia was willing to help. On March 18,
two days after the seizure of Prague, the Soviet government suggested
an immediate conference at Bucharest at which the democratic powers
might hammer out a common program. The British government rejected
this proposal as “premature.” By mid-April, Chamberlain began to see
the cardinal necessity of bringing the Russians in. Even so, he detested
doing so. His attitude and that of his government was strikingly like
their former attitude in regard to Spain. As politicians, as nationalists,
it was imperative to work with the Bolsheviks. But from a class point of
view, from the point of view of their deepest social instincts and eco-
nomic prejudices, they loathed the idea. What happened as a result of
this half-heartedness, this division of impulse, was inevitable — z. dawdling
approach to Russia, an incompetent and laggard and extremely half-
hearted attempt to bring Russia “in.”

134

INSIDE EUROPE

Not till June 12 did William Strang, Chamberlain’s right hand man
in the Foreign Office, set out for Moscow — ^though Maisky, the Soviet
Ambassador to London, appealed frantically for haste, and asked that
the British send Halifax or some cabinet minister, not merely a sub-
ordinate official (whom the Russians incidentally detested) ; not till
August 10 did the joint Anglo-French military mission finally arrive in
Leningrad. It was amusing, meantime, to detect the sudden change in
the British press in regard to Russian affairs. The Times and Observer
ceased — ^for a few strange weeks — ^to call Russians Bolsheviks ; the whole
stress was on the idea of Russia as a powerful and friendly national state,
with a proud history and a massive military machine, now an ally.

On the other hand, it must be firmly stated that the Russians — once
the British got to Moscow and indeed all through the negotiations — ^be-
haved insufferably. The British were half-hearted, badly informed, and
dull ; the Russians were mendacious, double-faced, and diabolically clever.
The negotiations broke down on two scores. First, the Russians asked
what help the Red Army should give Poland. The British, embarrassed,
referred to the Poles, who it is understood refused to countenance any
military assistance, at least by infantry. So the Russians — ^perplexed —
asked what was the object of having negotiations at all, if they were in
one breath asked to render assistance, and in another breath refused the
possibility of contributing it. Second, the Russians insisted on compre-
hensive privileges in regard to the Baltic states. They demanded the
right to intervene in the Baltic area not merely if the Baltics were directly
attacked by Germany, bat in the event of ‘‘indirect” aggression. In other
words — and we know now only too well what the Russians were driving
at — ^they wanted the prerogative of intervention in the Baltics even to
frustrate a purely internal coup d’etat that they might dislike. The British
could not accept this Baltic proposal. They thought it was too high a
price to pay for Russian help.

But we overreach our story. Let us return to Germany and Poland.
By March 28 the familiar grisly press war had begun. Dr. Goebbels un-
leashed all his inky guns. And progressively relations between Germany
and Poland disintegrated. The central issue was of course Danzig.
At this time Hitler did not openly admit that he intended to make an
issue of the Corridor and Silesia also, and to take them if he could.

Note well that the press campaign against Poland — ^which culminated
in the atrocity stories that. Sir Nevile Henderson believes, played a great
role in finally moving Hitler to open warfare — ^as well as the diplomatic

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW 135

and political campaign, were evolved by Germany almost overnight.
Since 1934 German relations with Poland had been quite cordial. Colonel
Beck, the Polish foreign minister, was amicably greeted in Berchtesgaden
as late as January, 1939; in the same month Ribbentrop went to War-
saw, and announced unctuously, '1 can assure the Germans in Poland
that the agreement of January 26, 1934 has put a final end to enmity
between our two peoples.” The Danzig and Corridor questions had been
“settled” five years before. During those five years, hardly a breath of
complaint was heard from Germany. Then, in twenty-four hours, the
situation of Danzig and the Corridor became “intolerable.” Overnight,
the Germans found it too “terrible” to be borne.

Danzig is, incontestably, a German city. It was, incontestably, removed
from Germany by a very stupid and shortsighted provision of the 1919
treaties. Yet Danzig, though German, was of profound and legitimate im-
portance to Poland too, since it controlled Poland’s outlet to the sea.
It is German ; but its hinterland was Polish, also incontestably. Danzig
meant, of course, more to Hitler than Danzig. It meant prestige, it meant
a new diplomatic victory, it meant above all power. He thought of it as
a wedge into the Corridor, which was — ^and still is — ^more Polish than
German. Danzig was to be for Poland what the Sudetenland turned
out to be for Czechoslovakia.

Again and again, as a dark spring entered into tortured summer, the
British told Hitler that they would fight for Poland, would fight even
for Danzig. As early as May 27 Henderson said to Goering that “if
Germany atten^pted to settle German-Polish differences by unilateral ac-
tion such as would compel the Poles to resort to arms to safeguard their
independence,” the British and French would make war on Germany.
(British Blue Book, p. xiii.) On August 15, Henderson told Baron von
Weizsacker, the state secretary in the Germcin foreign office, that “if the
Poles were compelled by any act of Germany to resort to arms to defend
themselves, there was not a shadow of doubt that we would give them
our full armed support.” He appealed to the Germans not to make the
“tragic mistake” of believing the contrary. Another warning to Hitler
in person, in even firmer language, came on August 25. Still the Germans
would not listen. Until the last, they never believed that the British
would actually care — or dare — ^to fight.

By July the situation — centering on Danzig — ^had reached full and
angry crisis. The gist of it was that the Germans, who already had com-
plete political control of Danzig (they had Nazified it by progressive

INSIDE EUROPE

136

stages since 1933), began to militarize the area. Troops and supplies
poured into Danzig from East Prussia. At the same time — though we
did not know it then — Germany began important military movements in
Slovakia ; the town of Bratislava became the headquarters of a German
army command in June. The Poles didn’t know quite what line to take
in regard to Danzig. It seemed that at any moment Germany might try
the ruse of an internal Danzig coup, as to which they could disclaim
responsibility ; the Poles, then, would have to take the onus of aggression.
All through July and early August came incidents and agitation. Colonel
Beck announced finally the three fundamental Polish desiderata : First,
Danzig must retain its status as a Free State; second, it must remain
within the Polish customs union; third, Polish shipping and railway
rights must be safeguarded. Then on August 7 came a new crisis over
Polish customs inspectors in the Danzig area who were dismissed by the
Danzig (Nazi) authorities. Obviously this maneuver had one intention,
the removal of Polish officials who might detect and seek to halt the con-
tinued stream of German military goods entering the area. The Poles
sent a fairly stifiF note to Germany, warning the Germans not to inter-
fere in Polish-Danzig affairs. Germany chose to regard this as an
^‘ultimatum.”

Following is part of the telegram Lord Halifax sent the British
ambassador in Warsaw on August 15 :

“I have the impression that Herr Hitler is still undecided, and anxious
to avoid war and to hold his hand if he can do so without losing face.
As there is a possibility of him not forcing the issue, it is evidently essen-
tial to give him no excuse for acting, whether or not conversations about
Danzig at some future time may be possible. It therefore seems of the
first importance to endeavour to get the local issues (customs inspec-
tors, margarine and herrings) settled at once, and not to let questions
of procedure or ‘Tace” at Danzig stand in the way. It also seems essen-
tial that the Polish Government should make every effort to moderate
their press, even in the face of a German press campaign and to inten-
sify their efforts to prevent attacks on their German minority.”^

Meantime, on July 17, General Ironside and a British military mis-
sion arrived in Warsaw to inspect the Polish defenses and presumably
arrange collaboration. In August, after laborious discussion, the British

* From the British Blue Book, Documents Concerning German-Polish Relations
and the Outbreak of Hostilities between Great Britain and Germany on September
3, Ip39. Cmd. 6106, p. 92.

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW

137

gave Poland a credit of £8,000,000 for purchase of war materials. The
Poles did not, however, obtain a cash advance of £5,000,000 they asked
for. This produced a certain amount of ill-feeling m Warsaw. At the
moment the British were spending at least £2,000,000 per day on their
own armament. It seemed that they did not consider their Polish ally
to be worth even two and a half day’s expenditure.

By mid- August an explosion was predictably imminent. The Germans
continued their onslaughts; the Poles remained restlessly defensive;
the British sought to make a settlement. Then came climax in the form
of an utterly unexpected surprise — ^the Russo-German non-aggression
pact.

The Russo-German Pact

I happened to be in Moscow on August 19, 1939. That evening a small
group of journalists and diplomats read with amazement a brief an-
nouncement in the Pravda, It stated that the Soviet Union had just ar-
ranged a trade agreement with Germany. The Reich agreed to lend
Russia 200 million marks with which Russia should buy German goods.
And Germany during the next seven years was to buy Russian goods
valued at 180 million marks.

This announcement was, after all, not so surprising as it first seemed.
Russo-German commercial discussions had been going on for months,
it was well known. But at this precise time the announcement was un-
expected if only because of the Russian negotiations with the British
and French delegations in Moscow. At first well informed folk thought
that the Russo-German commercial agreement was meritorious. After
all Russia and Germany are, or should be, excellent economic partners.
The optimists thought that the agreement might assist peace. It might
give Hitler just the alternative to warfare that he needed, an opportunity
to unwind economically, to transform his economy from a wartime to a
peacetime basis, by a large export business with Russia.

But on August 21 news came that pushed the sensational enough
commercial agreement into complete insignificance. Late that night a
laconic communique stated that Germany and Russia had negotiated a
non-aggression treaty. Nothing more unbelievable could be imagined.
Astonishment and skepticism turned quickly to consternation and alarm.
Promptly Ribbentrop arrived in Moscow, and on August 24 the pact
was signed. It was a far reaching document, going considerably beyond

INSIDE EUROPE

138

the stipulations of most non-aggression treaties. It bound the signatories
to consult, to refrain from any acts of force against one another, and to
refuse support to any third power attacking either contracting party.

(The first comment I heard in Moscow was, ‘Well, Stalin joined the
anti-Comintern pact today. . .

It seemed, at the beginning, almost too much to believe — ^that Stalin,
under the very nose of the French and British delegations, had leapt into
the enemy’s camp, that Russian communists should extend the hand of
friendship and collaboration to German Nazis, that the Russians, who
for years had feared Hitler like poison, should now join the man who for
years had called them his mortal and implacable enemy. Yet, certain
shrewd observers had seen which way the wind was blowing. They had
seen that communism and Fascism were more closely allied than was
normally understood. On August 16, Baron Weizsacker significantly
hinted to Sir Nevile Henderson that “Russian assistance to the Poles
would not only be entirely negligible, but that the U.S.S.R. would even
in the end join in sharing in the Polish spoils.” (British Blue Book,
p. 91.)

The reason Hitler negotiated the Russian pact is quite clear, even
though he had no ardent desire to do so.® By the pact he hoped finally
to frighten Great Britain off, to freeze and squeeze the British into neu-
trality. It was his last desperate bid to get what he wanted, Danzig and
the rest, without warfare. The Russo-German pact isolated and in fact,
as we know now, doomed Poland. It condemned Poland to death. Hitler
calculated that the Bntish would anticipate this, and would therefore force
Poland to submit to his demands. But what happened was the contrary.
The Russo-German pact stiffened the British. It turned the British to
stronger support of Poland than ever before,

(Sir Nevile Henderson is inclined to blame Ribbentrop for Hitler’s
bad information about the British. He writes in one dispatch that the idea
propounded to him by Weizsacker — ^that the British would not fight —
“sounded like Herr von Ribbentrop who had never been able to under-
stand the British mentality.” On another occasion, in the New York
Times, October 18, 1939, Henderson is quoted as saying that Hitler
came to regard Ribbentrop more and more as a second Bismarck, “a con-

® Henderson telegraphed Halifax on August 24 • “In referring to the Russian non-
aggression pact he [Hitler] observed that it was England which had forced him into
agreement with Russia. He did not seem enthusiastic over it but added that once he
made an agreement it would be for a long period.” British Blue Book, p. loi.

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW

139

viction which Herr von Ribbentrop himself probably shared to the

full/0

As to Stalin’s motives for signing the pact with Hitler, they are quite
clear too. The pact was an enormous diplomatic victory for Russia. It
made the British angry, but for some months at least, angry as they were,
the British treated Stalin more politely than previously.

1. The Russo-German pact removed in a stroke — ^provisionally at
least — ^the single greatest preoccupation of Soviet foreign policy. It ban-
ished the deepest Russian fear — ^fear of attack by Germany. It eliminated
the danger of aggression by Germany against the Soviet Union for a
considerable time to come.

2. It was a wonderful maneuver against the Russian enemy in the
east, Japan, since it gave Russia virtually a free hand against Japan. The
Russians felt that no longer would they have to watch both frontiers. The
Japanese, stunned and frightened, immediately agreed to a truce in the
Far East. A Russo-Japanese non-aggression pact may follow.

3. By isolating Poland it made the subsequent Russian attack on
Poland and Russian penetration into the Baltic states possible.

4. It served to destroy the anti-Comintern pact, which had for years
been the focus of Fascist designs on the U.S.S.R.

5. By making war virtually inevitable, it put the Soviet Union into a
position where it could profit so long as the war lasted, no matter how
the war should turn out.

One result of the pact was, of course, to end Popular Frontism,
which could hardly survive such a violent ideological twist. A Popular
Front against Fascism had little meaning after the Russians joined the
Fascists. But Stalin was probably tired of this strategic deviation, which
is what Popular Frontism was. He was tired of picking democratic chest-
nuts out of the fire. He began to look for chestnuts of his own.

I discuss other aspects of Russian relations with Germany as well
as the general course of Soviet foreign policy in Chapter XL below.
It is time now to proceed with our main story.

Grim Harvest in Poland

*The Sudetenland is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe."

— Hitler, September 26, 1938.

‘‘Germany has concluded a non-aggression pact with Poland . . . and she will
adhere to it unconditionally."

—Hitler, May 31, I 93 S-

“Germany is the bulwark of the West against Bolshevism.”

— ^Hitler, November 29, 1935.

140

INSIDE EUROPE

The last tragic act came quickly. The catastrophe was now beyond
i-ontrol. The nerves and vitality of the continent had been sapped by
the long crisis. There was nothing to do with Hitler now except stop
him by force. The last act took only twelve crowded and terrible days.
On August 24 the Russo-German pact was signed. On September i the
Germans invaded Poland.

These twelve days of body-wracking tension and suspense were occu-
pied mainly by last-minute strenuous and dogged negotiations between
Britain and Germany. The other countries in effect dropped out. They
took to the sidelines. They watched the two giants fight. The showdown
had come finally. It was Germany against the world, but Britain against
Germany.

This is not to say that nothing happened in other countries. Plenty
happened. Belgium, Holland, France, and Italy mobilized, as well Ger-
many and Poland. It was like the Munich crisis of the year before, but
much sharper, much more highly geared. France, with three million
men in arms, closed its frontier with Italy, which had 1,700,000 men
mobilized. The Mediterranean was barred to British shipping ; Germans
were told to leave Great Britain; by the thousand, American tourists
scurried home. Germany filled Slovakia with troops, and a thousand
German planes landed there. The Pope appealed for peace ; so did Presi-
dent Roosevelt. On August 24 the Nazi leader, Foerster, became head of
state in Danzig. Frontier incidents occurred daily along the whole Polish
border. On August 27, German planes incessantly flew over the Polish
port Gdynia, and armed Germans at a dozen points sought to enter
Polish territory. On August 29 the Dutch and Belgians made a peace
offer. It was in vain. And anyway too late.

During these tremendous days Sir Nevile Henderson saw Hitler four
times for four tremendous colloquies.

The first meeting took place at Berchtesgaden on August 23. Hender-
son brought with him a last appeal in the form of a letter from Chamber-
lain. (The Germans recognized that Chamberlain could not himself come
to Germany, this time !) The letter presented three main ideas, that the
British would stand unalterably by their pledge to Poland, that they were
prepared to discuss all matters between the two countries peaceably, and
that they would welcome direct conversations — ^in regard to minorities
and the like — ^between Germany and Poland.

Let Henderson tell the story:

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW

141

'We arrived Salzburg soon after ii a.m. and motored to Berchtes-
gaden, where I was received by Herr Hitler shortly after i p m, I had de-
rived the impression that atmosphere was likely to be most unfriendly
and that probability was that interview would be exceedingly brief. . . .

"During the whole of this first conversation Herr Hitler was excitable
and uncompromising. He made no long speeches but his language was
violent and exaggerated both as regards England and Poland. He began
by asserting that the^ Polish question would have been settled on the
most generous terms if it had not been for England’s unwarranted sup-
port. . . .

"He then violently attacked the Poles, talked of 100,000 German
refugees from Poland, excesses against Germans, closing of German
institutions and Polish systematic persecution of German nationals gen-
erally. . . .

"At the end of this first conversation Herr Hitler observed, in reply to
my repeated warnings that direct action by Germany would mean war,
that Germany had nothing to lose and Great Britain much ; that he did
not desire war but would not shrink from it if it was necessary; and that
his people were much more behind him than last September. . . .

"I spoke of tragedy of war and of his immense responsibility but his
answer was that it would be all England’s fault. I refuted this only to
learn from him that England was determined to destroy and exterminate
Germany. He was, he said, 50 years old : he preferred war now to when
he would be 55 or 60.”

(British Blue Book, pp. 98-100.)

It was in this conversation that Hitler first mentioned that Germans
had been "castrated” by Poles. He several times returned to this allega-
tion.

Hitler answered Chamberlain’s letter with a threat of full mobilization,
and on August 25 Henderson was received for the second time. Hitler
said by way of introduction that "the assertion that Germany affected
to conquer the world was ridiculous. The British Empire embraced 40
million square kilometers, Russia 19 million, America 9J4 million,
whereas Germany embraced less than 600 thousand square kilometers.
It is quite clear who it is who desires to conquer the world.” Hitler pro-
ceeded to mention Poland’s "intolerable provocations”; he said that
Germany would at all cost abolish the "Macedonian conditions” on its
eastern frontier ; he agreed that the war, if it came, would be long and
bloody, and, speaking of Russia in warm terms, said that Germany
would have to fight only on one frontier; finally, he agreed to "accept
the British Empire and pledge himself personally for its continued
existence and to place the power of the German Reich at its disposal,”

142

INSIDE EUROPE

on certain conditions. These conditions appeared to be, first, a limited
colonial settlement, second, no interference with German relations with
Italy and Russia.

Hitler was quite calm during this conversation, Henderson reports.
“He was absolutely calm and normal and spoke with great earnestness
and apparent sincerity."^ Henderson suggested that Ribbentrop and Beck
meet somewhere. Hitler demurred. It was in this talk that Hitler made
two extraordinary statements. First, that “the only winner of another
European war would be Japan.” Second, that he was an artist by nature,
not a politician, and that when the Polish question was settled he wished
to retire from politics and “end his life as an artist.”

Henderson flew to London at Hitler’s suggestion — ^this was on the
26th — ^and the British cabinet spent an agitated week-end studying the
German note and preparing a reply. It accepted, without commitment
as to detail, the German suggestion for a general understanding with
Great Britain. But it reiterated that a settlement of the Polish problem
must come first, and that this must come peaceably. It suggested direct
negotiations between Germany and Poland, with Britain lending its good
offices to the discussion. The Poles, the British said, would agree to talk.

Henderson flew back to Berlin with this message and was received
by Hitler for the third interview on August 28. In this conversation Hit-
ler for the first time went beyond his first demands ; he now asked not
merely for Danzig but for the Corridor and for a “rectification” in
Silesia. Henderson appealed to him not to raise his price. Hitler then
asked if Great Britain would accept an alliance with Germany, and if
the British would offer Germany “something in the way of colomes as
evidence of her good intentions.” As to the alliance, Henderson said
cautiously that personally he did not exclude it as a possibility; as to
colonies, he said that “concessions were easier of realization” in a good
atmosphere. The next day, August 29, came the written German reply.
And this reply brought climax.

The Fuhrer received Henderson at 7:15 P.M. This, the fourth great
interview, was “stormy.” Poland had mobilized, and the German press
reported that five Germans had been killed by Poles. This excited Hitler
violently. Later, in October, when Henderson wrote his report of the
whole extraordinary episode, he stated that he believed that this report
“was probably fabricated by extremists in fear he [Hitler] was weak-
ening.” Hitler, according to Henderson, was walled off from every ad-
vice but that of extremists. On the 28th Henderson found Hitler

FROM MUNICH TO WARSAW 143

' friendly and reasonable/’ On the 29th he was ‘^upset and uncompro-
mising.”

Hitler’s note of the 29th made three points:

1. Germany was skeptical of success, but solely out of desire to achieve
friendship with Britain, it would accept the principle of direct negotia-
tions with Poland.

2. In the event of any territorial changes Germany could not partici-
pate in any guarantees without consulting the Soviet Union.

3. The Polish plenipotentiary — ^with whom the direct negotiations
would presumably be instituted— must arrive in Berlin by the 30th of
August, the next day.

Henderson’s dispatch to Halifax states:

^T remarked that this phrase sounded like an ultimatum, but after
some heated remarks both Herr Hitler and Herr von Ribbentrop assured
me that it was only intended to stress urgency of the moment when the
two fully mobilised armies were standing face to face. I said that I would
transmit this suggestion immediately to His Majesty’s Government,
and asked whether, if such Polish plenipotentiary did come, we could
assume that he would be well received and that discussions would be con-
ducted on footing of complete equality. Herr Hitler’s reply was 'of
course.’ ”

(British Blue Book, p. 138).

This gave the Poles from 7:15 P.M. on the 29th to midnight on the
30th, that is 28 hours and 45 minutes, to send an emissary to Berlin.
The British at once said that it was unreasonable to expect that Colonel
Beck or anyone else should arrive in Germany at such short notice.
The official German note of the 29th then put a different complexion
on the matter ; it stated that "the German government will immediately
draw up proposals for a solution acceptable to themselves'* (italics
mine) to place before the Polish negotiator. The British protested. They
asked why the Germans could not submit the proposals in the normal
way to the Polish ambassador, for transmission to his government. The
Poles had no intention of sending an emissary if he was going to be
treated like Schuschnigg or Hacha. They did not intend to come to Ber-
lin if coming to Berlin meant their own death sentence, if it meant cutting
their own throats.

Henderson saw Ribbentrop on the evening of the 30th. Ribbentrop —
it must have been an an??*zing scene — ^pulled a long document from his
pocket and read it, in German, "at top speed.” These were the 16 points
which the Germans had formulated for settlement with Poland. They

144

INSIDE EUROPE

included cession of Danzig and a plebiscite in the Corridor. When
Ribbentrop concluded Henderson asked him for the text. Ribbentrop
refused to give it to him, on the ground that the Polish plenipotentiary-
had not arrived. Henderson was stupefied. He inquired why, at least,
Ribbentrop did not summon the Polish ambassador and give him the
proposals. “In the most violent terms Ribbentrop said that he would
never ask the Ambassador to visit him.’* But Ribbentrop then said that
if the ambassador took the initiative in requesting the interview, “it
might be different.”

Beginning at 8 A.M. the next day, August 31, the Polish ambassador,
M. Lipski, requested that he be received. He was asked, “Do you come
as an ambassador or as a plenipotentiary ?” He said he came as an am-
bassador. The Polish government meantime agreed to accept the prin-
ciple of direct discussions. In London Lord Halifax sent telegram after
telegram appealing to both Warsaw and Berlin for moderation and a
last minute settlement.

The Poles agreed to instruct Lipski to tell Ribbentrop that Poland
accepted the British proposals, though they did not like the prospect that
he might simply be given a document in the form of an ultimatum. Fi-
nally at 6 130 P.M. Lipski was received. Ribbentrop handed him the six-
teen points. At once Lipski sought to get into communication with his
government. It was too late. The Germans had already cut the lines to
Warsaw. At 9 P.M. (August 31) the Germans broadcast the sixteen
points, and said that Poland had rejected them. As a matter of fact the
Polish government never saw them. Nor did the British government.
Neither the Poles nor the British knew what the German demands were
till they heard them on the radio. Germany presented its program while
at the same time — final fantastic detail — contriving that no one had
a chance to consider it.

At dawn, the next morning, September i, the German invasion of
Poland began ; with incredible hypocrisy Ribbentrop said that the Poles
were invading Germany. So— once again — ^war came to weary Europe J
So — once again — Europe vibrated to the shock of marching men.

^ Events of the first months of the war itself are sketched in a brief introduction
to this volume.

Chapter X

Daladier and Blum

if DOUARD DALADIER, the war prime minister of France, wha
^ rules the country with full powers of a sort unparalleled in recent
French history, lives in a modest four room apartment on the Rue
Anatole des Forges, a few moments from the Arc de Triomphe. The
neighborhood, like so many in Paris, is divided sharply between a fash-
ionable sector and one not so fashionable. M. Daladier lives on the
non-fashionable side. Recently I inspected this neighborhood. I wanted
to see what the prime minister’s habitat was. I wanted to see what he
saw when he went to work in the morning, when he returned home for
lunch and dinner every day.

M. Daladier is an average man. This is a central point for under-
standing his character. And he lives in an average — ^an extremely
typical — French neighborhood. First you note the rounded glistening
cobbles of the Rue Anatole des Forges, then the broad sidewalks of
the Avenue Carnot, planted with plane-trees. The young trees are
protected by circular iron cages. In the balconies of the upper apart-
ments, behind their metal grills, are bright flower boxes. Above them
rise soft gray mansard roofs.

Urban France is composed preeminently of small shopkeepers. M.
Daladier could live his whole life within a few yards of his apartment,
and never lack anything. This is typical of Paris, where almost every
neighborhood is self-sustaining. Autarchy descends to the local street
corner. The shops contain every necessity for a reasonable life. On the
nearest corner is a big Cafe Tabac, advertising beer on its orange
awning, with its terrace comfortably packed with orange rattan chairs.
In front of the cafe is a good homely pissoir, and next to it an old
lady selling roses from a wicker basket. She keeps her reserve flowers
in a battered, rusty, iron pail.

I counted the shops. The Boucherie de I’fitoile, under a magenta
awning, sells meat. You see kidneys, livers, legs of mutton, on white
tile counters. Next is the Cremerie, with a truckload of empty milk
bottles before it. The truck is drawn by heavy, shaggy horses, with
enormous thighs. Next, in the Boulangerie Patisserie, you see windows

145

INSIDE EUROPE

146

stacked with incomparable French bread, in slim loaves, a yard long.
Then another Cafe Tabac, then a Pharmacie full of cheap medicines
and thermos bottles. The coiffeur, next in line, is followed — ^inevitably —
by the dealer in antiquities, who advertises rugs and draperies, and — even
more inevitably — ^by that standard pivot of France, the wood-and-coal
merchant. Then comes a shoe shop (advertised as a Maison de Con-
fiance), then an electrician-locksmith (with a huge gold key over
his door), then a Papeterie where the newspapers are neatly folded.
French-fashion, the long way, and where some tattered postcards
are displayed in wire trays. Finally comes a shop for mops, pails,
and household goods, and at last another Cremerie, with a white enamel
sign embossed on its shining windows.

This is the kind of neighborhood that exists in a thousand different
parts of Paris, and in ten thousand French towns and villages. M.
Daladier could not have chosen a more average place to live in.

Presently I decided that I would also visit the place where the Prime
Minister works. His office is not the Palais Matignon, which his
predecessor Leon Blum used, but the ministry of war. And it is typical
of Daladier that he chose the ministry of war as his headquarters, even
before war broke out. Not because he is militant by nature. Very few
Frenchmen are. Not because he is bellicose. But, on the contrary,
because when he took office the war ministry fittingly symbolized
French preoccupation with security and national defense. Daladier
was war minister before he became prime minister. One of his great
sources of power was his close connection with the army. He has been
war minister off and on for years.

The low sweeping buildings of the Ministere de la Guerre on the
Rue St. Dominique are in considerable contrast to the shops of M.
Daladier's home neighborhood. Here, behind the Quai d’Orsay, in
the heart of the Faubourg St. Germain, is the citadel of old France,
the France of literate aristocracy, massive social tradition, and superb
taste and cultivation. The pavements are not cobbled here, but polished,
glistening asphalt. There are few shops; instead, gracious old family
mansions, and a long faqade of public buildings. The war ministry itself
stretches along the Rue St. Dominique for two or three solid blocks,
flush with the street. A series of tall gates open into flowering court-
yards. Officers lean from ornate windows, and the sentries stand at
rather casual attention. From inside comes the soft click and hiss of
typewriters.

DALADIER AND BLUM

147

This is the gamut that Daladier represents: the typical bourgeois
small-Frenchman, a self-sufficient individualist, transported by the
pressure of events and his own career to the arena of politics and
military affairs, to the world of mass conflicts, extinction of the in-
dividual, and the second world war.

Personal Characteristics of Daladier

Daladier is short and stocky. He has big shoulders and heavy hands.
His eyes are a very bright clear blue, below uncombed eyebrows
which dart upward. The forehead is broad, the hair sparse. He smiles
almost continually when he talks: a quick perceptive smile, punctuated
by short bursts of rather hard laughter. His conversation is very quick
and to the point. He likes badinage, but doesn’t waste much time on
it. He can lose temper easily: the thick shoulders bulge, the face
turns red, the neck pushes against the low collar. Thus one of his
nicknames: The Bull of the Camargue.

He was born in this area of southern France, in the region of the
Rhone delta. His native village was Carpentras, in Vaucluse, and he
sits for this constituency to-day. His father was the local baker. When
the father died a few years ago, one of Daladier’s brothers took over
the bakery shop, and still runs it. There is no false pride in Daladier.
Several of his contemporaries — ^Hitler for instance — resolutely ignore
members of the family who still hold humble station. Not so Daladier.
He is a frequent visitor to Vaucluse and his native village, and knows
every stick, stone, and person by heart.

I asked one of Daladier’s closest friends and collaborators what
he represented most. The answer came that Daladier, a peasant, born
of peasant stock, above all represented the land — ^the soil — of France.
From this basic peasanthood other characteristics derive. As a peasant
Daladier believes unalterably in private property, in personal ownership
of land. As a peasant, too, he stands for hard work, for tenacious culti-
vation of his soil. He wants to hold what he has. Then, again, as a
peasant, he is both an individualist and a democrat. He stands for him-
self ; he stands too for equality with his fellow men. Finally, like most
peasants, Daladier is a bit ingrown, a bit mefiant — suspicious. He but-
tons his collar close, as the French like to say.

He worked a hard day as a child; he works a hard day now. He
arrives at the war ministry early. His office is that of Clemenceau’s in
the last great war — ^not an uninteresting juxtaposition. There the day’*

INSIDE EUROPE

148

reports, interviews, correspondence, await him. Like that of every
prime minister, his range of responsibility is enormous. He goes home
to lunch, returning to the office in mid-afternoon. Then he stays at
his desk till late — ^usually well into the evening, nine o^clock or later.
He's not always easy to work with; basically his humor is good, but
when fatigued he may ride his collaborators hard.

A head of state, a prime minister, must listen to a great many people,
and take information and advice from a bewildering array of friends
and subordinates. But Daladier sees comparatively few people. He has
no social life at all. He isolates himself at home or in the war ministry,
and receives nowhere near as many visitors as did his predecessors
Herriot or Chautemps. The diplomats find it rather difficult to see
him, except the American ambassador, William C. Bullitt, whom he
likes and trusts deeply. But he is very frugal with his friendship;
few people know him well. The two members of his cabinet closest to
him are Guy la Chambre, the youthful minister of air, and Champetier
de Ribes, the assistant foreign minister. Among his confidential as-
sistants are General Decamp, his chef de cabinet as war minister, and
an old friend, M. Clapier, also a man from Vaucluse, who is chef de
cabinet in the prime minister's office. For political affairs his closest
adviser is Jacques Keyser, journalist and vice president of the Radical
Socialist party,

Daladier has no interest in money. He has never been rich, and has
never wanted to be. He lives on his salary, and is one of the com-
paratively few French politicians never touched by any financial or
other scandal. Nor has Daladier any interest in religion, another of
those basic preoccupations, like sex and money, which dominate the
lives of most people. He has never had a religious crisis. One of his
remote ancestors was what the Spanish call a penitente^ a professional
mourner at village funerals, but for generations his family has been
anti-clerical. Daladier is, as the French say, very Icnque. Yet his rela-
tions with the church are cordial.

Daladier likes good food and lots of it. He smokes moderately, mostly
a pipe. He drinks as any normal Frenchman drinks, and is very fond
of a derivative of absinthe known as pastis. He is one of the few
French prime ministers fond of sport. Most politicians in Paris have
hardly taken five minutes' exercise in their lives. But Daladier likes
to walk, ride, and swim. He often visits Chantilly or Rambouillet, and
for a time kept two horses. When the day’s work was done, he had

DALADIER AND BLUM

149

a brief canter in whatever park was nearest. Before he could afford
horses, he bicycled for exercise; even as prime minister, during his
first term in 1933, he would leave the office, get his bicycle, and pedal
his way across Paris or out into the country. Nowadays he swims
a good deal. He likes to swim in the Oise at night, near Chantilly. His
chief intellectual exercise is reading; he was a professor of history
for many years, and still reads a good deal especially on military affairs
and on the history of the middle ages and renaissance. He speaks no
language except French and his native Provencal, with perhaps a few
words of Spanish and Italian.

Shortly after the war Daladier married a Mademoiselle Laffont, the
daughter of a scientist, who had been his '‘marraine’* while he was in
the trenches; “marraine” was the name given during the Great War
to girls back home who regularly corresponded with some soldier.
Came demobilization; immediately Dajadier looked up this girl whose
letters had helped carry him through four brutal years of war, but
whom he had never met; he fell in love with her and married her.
He was madly devoted to her. She died about eight years ago. The blow
was a terrible one for Daladier. He has been a lonely man ever since.
The Daladiers had two sons. One, Jean, is now 17; the other, Pierre,
is 13. Daladier is very close to them. They are the core of his heart. His
wife lives still in the person of the two sons. His boys mean more to
Daladier than anything in France, except perhaps France itself.

The Bull of Vaucluse

fidouard Daladier was born at Carpentras in Vaucluse on June 18,
1884. Not only was his father the village baker, and his grandfather be-
fore that ; his mother, whose maiden name was Mories, was the daughter
of a baker in a neighboring village, Montmoron. Bread was the staff
of the Daladier life. Young fidouard went to the village school;
snapshots exist of him, a dark, pert-looking boy, sitting at his crude
desk. At eleven he proceeded to another school, got a scholarship,
studied in Lyon, and finally entered that holy of holies of the French
rational mind, the ficole Normale Superieure. He was graduated with
distinction, and set out to be a teacher. Then came 1914. Daladier was
called up, and became a sergeant of tirailleurs, then a captain. He won
the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre with three citations.

But long before this he had become interested in politics. A few
yards from the ancestral boulangerie — ^where the Daladiers, of course.

INSIDE EUROPE

150

baked as well as sold their own bread — ^was the homely Cafe du
Commerce of Carpentras. Its second floor was the headquarters of the
local radical-socialist party. From the beginning Daladier was a radical ;
he has always been a radical. Unlike a great number of French poli-
ticians, he has never changed party. As a boy, he listened to the older
radicals of Carpentras; he decided to enter politics, and while still
teaching at Grenoble was elected mayor of Carpentras, his first political
post. A “radical-socialist’' in France, be it noted, is often not a radical,
and seldom a socialist. Rather the radical-socialist party, normally the
most powerful in France, corresponds roughly to the English liberals
or the American democrats, covering widely divergent political beliefs.

When the war was over, Daladier turned seriously to a political
career, though for some years he kept a teaching job too. He is one
of the very few notables in French politics who is not a lawyer or
journalist by profession. In 1919, aged 35, he ran for the Chamber of
Deputies, and was elected for the Vaucluse constituency. He has been
its deputy ever since.

Daladier’s political career was, in a curious way, both comparatively
rapid and — for a long time — comparatively undistinguished. He was
a good radical wheelhorse ; not brilliant, but safe ; stable, not eccentric
or dangerous. He continued to be the middle-of-the-road Frenchman.
He was not ambitious enough to arouse jealousy in his superiors; he
worked hard and was dependable for almost any kind of job.

From 1924 Daladier was a familiar figure in all radical-socialist cabi-
nets. The variety of posts he held is worth recording:

June, 1924-April, 1925 — Minister of Colonies.

October, 1925-November, 1925 — Minister of War.

October, i92S-March, 1926— Minister of Education.

July, 1926 (for three days) — Minister of Education.

February, 1930 (for three days) — Minister of Public Works.

December, 1930-January, 1931 — Minister of Public Works.

June, 1932-December, 1932 — Minister of Public Works.

December, 1932-January, 1933 — Minister of War.

January, 1933-October, 1933 — Prime Minister and Minister of War.
October, 1933-November, 1933 — Minister of War.

November, 1933-January, 1934 — Minister of War (different cabinet).
January, 1934-February, 1934 (for eight days) — Prime Minister and
Foreign Minister.

June, 1936- April, 1938 — ^Vice-Premier and Minister of National Defense
and War.

DALADIER AND BLUM

151

April, 1938-December, 1939 — Prime Minister and Minister of National
Defense and War.

September, 1939 to date — Prime Minister, Minister of National De-
fense and War, and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Note the gradually increasing power Daladier reserves for himself.
Note also that, three different times, he held office for eight days or
even less, and that on four other occasions, his tenure was only about
a month. Daladier is a good democrat. But there is no denying that
the incessant shufflings and reshufflings in parliament, the extreme
brevity of life of most French governments, and the consequent in-
security of office, have impressed him a good deal. It is significant, too,
that Daladier has never been a great parliamentarian His speeches in
the Chamber are seldom as effective as those he gives in the country
at large; also, his popularity is much greater in the country than in
the parliamentary corridors. When Daladier became prime minister
in April, 1938, after the collapse of the Front Populaire, it was not
surprising that he soon asked for full powers. Recently he postponed
the next general election from 1940 to 1942.

It would be unfair, however, to call Daladier a dictator. He is still —
even in war time — ^the servant of the chamber. He could at any time
be dismissed from office by an adverse vote of the chamber. He has
made no attempt to build up a totalitarian machine, nor are the pleins
pouvoirs, full powers, that the chamber granted him, really excep-
tional. In emergencies, France almost always calls for a strong hand.
And all states must centralize authority in time of war. Later they
get over such temporary totalitarianism as may be necessary, as a
healthy boy gets over measles. Even in peace time, French prime
ministers have often ruled with special powers. Poincare and Laval both
governed by decree for long intervals. Daladier may be a dictator in
the sense that Clemenceau was a dictator, not in the sense of Stalin,
Hitler, Mussolini.

During his early career Daladier cultivated a special intellectual in-
terest — ^military affairs. He traveled a good deal (something that most
Frenchmen don't do) and in the 20's visited the Soviet Union, Great
Britain, Germany, always with an eye open for army matters. For a
time he was deeply interested in the Near East ; he specialized in Syria
and Turkey and wrote a preface to Jacques Keyser’s book on Bulgaria.
But military business was his main preoccupation. By 1923 or 1924, he
had become the radical party's best spokesman on army affairs. He cul-

INSIDE EUROPE

152

tivated the acquaintance of army officers, and by the time he was min-
ister of war in 1932 he was in as close touch with the French general
staff as it was possible for a civilian to be. He is called the best French
war minister since Maginot. He had no time to get started in 1932, but
in 1933-34, when he was minister of war uninterruptedly for 13 months,
he grasped a real opportunity to overhaul the French army, revitalize
it, and above all mechanize it. Maginot built the line ; Daladier built the
tanks, the armored cars, the caterpillar trucks, behind it. That the French
army is to-day the best in Europe — ^when it needs to be just as good as
it can be — ^is partly Daladier’s work.

Since 1927, with one or two interruptions, Daladier has been presi-
dent of the radical socialist party. When he wasn’t president, his great
rival fidouard Herriot (who was one of his early teachers) was. Dala-
dier and Herriot were close friends for many years; Herriot thought
of Daladier as his protege, and in 1924 gave him his first cabinet post.
Later they quarreled, and became jealous of one another. When Dala-
dier succeeded Herriot as prime minister in 1933, Herriot snapped that
he wouldn’t last ten weeks. But Daladier stuck it out ten months.
Daladier represented the younger element of the radicals, the radicals
who really wanted to be somewhat radical, against Herriot’s conserva-
tism. In 1939 Herriot had ambitions to become president of France,
the supreme job — ^nominally — ^in the Republic. But Daladier thought he
might give the job more than nominal attention, and so contrived that
old Albert Lebrun should run for reelection — ^though presidents in
France don’t usually serve second terms — ^in order to keep Herriot out.

Front Populaire^

There have been two supreme crises in Daladier’s life. The first came
in February, 1934, when he had been prime minister only a few days,
and when bloody rioting forced him out after the Stavisky crisis. I tell
the Stavisky story later.

Daladier spent more than a year in the wilderness. But in the summer
of 1935, he sharply rose to influence again, when he brought his left
wing of the radicals into the newly formed Front Populaire. In the
July 14 demonstration that summer, Daladier marched to the Bastille
with Leon Blum, the leader of the socialists, and Marcel Thorez, the
communist chieftain. This was a sensational step. It is as if Franklin
Roosevelt, say, should celebrate Washington’s Birthday by raising the

^ See also Chapter XIII below.

DALADIER AND BLUM 153

clenched fist at Arlington in company with Norman Thomas and Earl
Browder. Before July, 1935 the radicals had resolutely refused any
serious cooperation with the socialists and communists. Likewise the
socialists had refused collaboration. When Daladier brought the radicals
in, the Front Populaire was born as an effective political force. In the
summer of 1936 came a general election, which the Leftist coalition
handsomely won. The chamber elected then rules France still. Leon
Blum became prime minister, with Daladier as vice premier and war
minister. Daladier, his enemies say, only joined the Popular Front on
the understanding that, when it came to power, he would be rewarded
with the war ministry. This is probably to overstate the truth. When the
leader of a powerful party adheres to a coalition to fight an election, it
is usually understood that he shall share in the responsibilities a^ d re-
wards of power.

The Popular Front, under Blum, with Daladier’s collaboration, lasted
from June, 1936, to April, 1938, when it collapsed. In its twenty-two
months of power, the Popular Front achieved a good deal. It was an
attempt to put liberalism into politics on a forceful scale. The Blum-
Daladier government reduced the power of the financial oligarchy and
the Bank of France, it nationalized the aviation industry, it coordinated
the railways, it established the 40-hour week, it gave workers holidays
with pay. Above all, it checked the growth of Fascism. It gave France
a much-needed respite from incessant turbulence and agitation by Right-
ist plotters.

But the Popular Front collapsed and died because its failures were
also formidable. It had to face one of the most difficult of all questions,
not merely for France but for the world : Can a Left government re-
form capitalism without abolishing it, can a Left government function
efficiently inside a capitalist structure? Blum was constantly perplexed
by the problem of how far to go. The communists pushed him left.
Daladier and the radicals held him to the right. Blum wobbled in the
middle. He outlined a tremendous program of social reform. But, ulti-
mately, the budgeteers and bankers had him at their mercy. He had to
have money. Only they could give it to him, since he had no mandate —
or desire — ^to make a real revolution. He came into office on a platform
of extreme socio-economic amelioration. But the more he gave to the
Left, the more he was at the mercy of the Right. Moreover, his own
Left let him down. He gave the trade unionists such privileges and

154 INSIDE EUROPE

concessions that work almost stopped. The industrial structure all but
disintegrated.

Blum and Daladier were, moreover, unceasingly pressed and harried
by the international problem, the mounting international crisis. The
Front Populaire government betrayed shocking cowardice in regard to
Spain, where the policy of non-intervention helped Franco — ^the ideologi-
cal enemy — ^win. But Spain wasn’t all. There was the pressing threat
of Germany under Hitler. France needed airplanes and munitions, it
had to inaugurate and push through a huge arms program. Yet at the
same time the government was shortening hours, tacitly encouraging
strikes, and making efficient production on a big scale impossible. During
the last six weeks of the Blum government, not a single airplane was
manufactured in France.

Daladier broke away from the Front Populaire, though he still paid
lip service to it. He succeeded Blum as prime minister, and began a
steady, marked turn to the right. He had always been suspicious of the
communists ; now this me fiance erupted into active hostility. Very soon
after he took office, the 40-hour week was, in actual practice, dropped.
Daladier began to attack the communists fiercely, and in November,
1938 he crushed a general strike. In September, 1939, after the Russian
pact with Germany and the Russian invasion of Poland, communist
deputies were arrested and the communist party suppressed.

When Daladier became prime minister in 1938, his declaration of
policy sounded a special note. He said, defense nationale est un
hlocf^ He made national defense the basic desideratum in every field;
he preached national unity, national integrity, national solidarity. He
said that France, to survive, must be strong; to be strong it must be
united ; to unite it became his task. Yet he was risking serious alienation
of the Left. The war came to his rescue, as it comes to the rescue of
every competent politician in office. Daladier rules by terms of a moral
authority he could not possibly have achieved in peace time. And — com-
munists aside — ^he has united France.

But one must go back a bit to mention the other supreme crisis in
Daladier’s career. This was Munich.

Daladier Ches Hitler

There are reasons for believing that Daladier deeply distrusted the
policies of the slippery Georges Bonnet, his former foreign minister.
The story is that he had one of his own trusted aides in the Quai d’Orsay,

DALADIER AND BLUM 155

to read and check all of Bonnet’s telegrams and instructions. Yet when
the Munich crisis came in September, 1938, Daladier followed Chamber-
lain’s lead. He went to Munich, he met Hitler and Mussolini, he helped
sell Czechoslovakia out. From the point of view of strict ethics Dala-
dier’s behavior was worse than Chamberlain’s. The British, after all,
were not pledged to defend Czechoslovakia ; the French were so pledged.
Czechoslovakia was the heart of the French security system in Europe.
Time and time again, even late in that tragic summer, the French
reiterated their promise to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid, as we have
seen. On July 12, Daladier himself said, ‘‘The solemn undertakings
we have given to Czechoslovakia are sacred and cannot be evaded.”
The betrayal that came in September — ^after remarks such as this — ^is
one of the harshest known to modern history.

The French put up three major excuses for the Munich episode. The
first is that France was not in any position to face a showdown, to
fight. The country was pervaded with defeatism; the air force was
inefficient and in bad order ; the national muscles were flabby with lack
of exercise. Second, even if the military position had been more hope-
ful, the great mass of French public opinion would not have supported
a war. A settlement — a settlement at any price — ^was what the people
wanted. They did not want to fight, to risk their lives, for Czecho-
slovakia. Third, and most important, the French willy-nilly had to
follow England. Daladier was not in any position to act independently.
He had to do what the British did, and what the British told hvm to do.

Daladier flew back to Paris after Munich, not at all happy about it,
glum, despondent, and vastly worried at what French reaction would
be. His plane circled the airport ; he saw a big crowd. He was terrified.
He thought that he and his advisers might be mobbed. Memories of
February 6 came to mind. He braced himself, wondering if the Gardes
Mobiles would be there to protect him, and stepped off the plane. To
his amazement, he was greeted with a wild ovation. Stupefied, he was
led in triumph to the Chamber.

It is difficult to sum up the sources of Daladier’s power. He is no
genius. He is no demagogue. He lacks magnetism, he lacks political
“oomph.” He is no titan, no born leader of men. He is certainly not
a “great” man, as Clemenceau was. Probably he is not even as strong
a man as Poincare. But he speaks the language of the average French-
man. This is his secret. Like the average Frenchman, he is resilient, an

INSIDE EUROPE

156

individualist, shrewd, not particularly ambitious, packed with common
sense, rational, and moderate. He has the incomparable advantage of
being archetypical of the people he represents. Therefore the people like
and trust him. They understand his every accent. He is one of themselves.

I asked one of his best friends what Daladier’s central faith was,
what he believed in most. The answer came, 'Three things.’’ I asked
what they were. “France. The small man. And himself.”

Leon Blum — Socialist

M. Leon Blum, the socialist exquisite of the lie Saint-Louis, was for
a few brief years a key figure in the world struggle between Fascism
and democracy. This elegant and fastidious man of letters, surrounded
by beautiful books and a few delicately chosen objets d’art, became the
main counterweight in contemporary Europe to the black shirts, the
mass propaganda, the crushing totalitarianism of Hitler and Mussolini.
The man of thought stood in opposition to the man of action. Against
the bruiser’s fist was M. Blum’s silver poniard of wit and intellect.
Against the loud speaker echoing the dictated will of a nation in bulk
came the thin but penetrating voice of M. Blum, the cultivated indi-
vidualist. He emerged from his Ivory Tower to confront Hitler and
Mussolini, men of the market-place.

Blum, leader of a mass movement, was not a man of the masses.
Therein lay both weaknesses and strength.

Nor was he, for many years, predominantly a man of politics. “Thank
God !” exclaimed one of France’s ambassadors, called to meet Blum for
the first time, “The new Prime Minister is not a politician !”

When Anthony Eden saw Blum just before he became President du
Conseil their conversation — ^about politics and the international situation
— ^languished. Then a change came. For an hour the veteran socialist and
the young British diplomat bubbled with reciprocal enthusiasm. They
were discussing Proust.

After he had been in power a week, one of his chief political oppo-
nents, as if to condone Blum’s momentary supremacy, sighed, “After
all, Leon is an aristocrat and a gentleman.”

When Blum came to London in July, 1936, for vitally important
discussions with the Locarno powers, he finished his work, then disap-
peared — ^into the British Museum. With his friend. Princess Elizabeth
Bibesco, he was renewing his acquaintance with the timeless beauty of
the Elgin marbles.

DALADIER AND BLUM 157

Blum is no demagogue. He is the last possible remove from the man
on horseback. He is utterly devoid of personal ambition. He is no oppor-
tunist, no adventurer. He is old— almost sixty-eight. Yet history called
him to fulfill at least one important function. He was the first leader
of a Popular Front government in an important bourgeois country
since the War. It was historically inevitable that the parties of the
Left, sometime, somewhere, should fuse. Blum performed their first
successful fusion.

Leon Blum was born on April 9, 1872, in Paris. Very few French
politicians, it happens, are Paris-bom; Blum and his inveterate an-
tagonist, Andre Tardieu, are exceptions. Blum’s family came originally
from Alsace. His father was a manufacturerer of silk ribbon, with a well-
known business which still exists on the Rue du Quatre Septembre. The
business, once prosperous, has suffered since styles in millinery changed.
Leon was one of five brothers; when the father died the business was
given to them jointly. Leon, however, and his younger brother, Rene,
who is art director of the Monte Carlo ballet, leave the other three in
charge. The family, as everyone knows, is Jewish, and all the Blums
have a strong family sense. Leon is not an orthodox communicant, but
friends call him a '‘good” Jew. The five brothers meet piously on each
anniversary of their father’s death.

Leon’s maternal grandmother was a remarkable woman, a Frondeuse,
blind for many years, who nevertheless owned a bookstore on the lie de
la Cite, had profound radical convictions, voiced them on fit occasions,
and held political salons twice a week. Young Blum was devoted to her.
Jules Renard, the dramatist, tells in his invaluable Journal how Blum
attended her. “Graceful as Antigone, Leon serves her, tells her what to
eat, prepares her food. Blind for thirty-six years, she looks in the direc-
tion of his voice. . . .” In 1901 Blum took her on a holiday through
Italy, giving her sight with his lucid explanatory conversation.

Blum’s mother emphasized the Jewish family tradition of unity, loy-
alty, and affection. The father was a merchant ; she was an intellectual.
She believed, almost too firmly, in justice, social and otherwise. At least
the story is told that when she gave apples to her five sons, during their
childhood, each got a different half of a different apple, so that full
impartiality might be attained. Blum adores her memory, and speaks
touchingly of her. He is, however, extremely stubborn about the privacy
of his non-public life. Questions about his family or home life are, with
charm, rebuffed.

INSIDE EUROPE

158

Blum had a first-rate education in classics and the humanities. He
went first to the Lycee Charlemagne, then the Lycee Henri IV (where
he studied philosophy under Henri Bergson), and finally the £cole Nor-
male Superieure. Eduard Herriot was his classmate there. Later he took
degrees in both philosophy and law. He was, at this time — an odd con-
tradiction — an experienced duelist. But challenges were few after he
wounded one antagonist. A recent cinema history of Blum, tracing his
career in photographs, shows him dueling — blithe, graceful, with wrists
of celerity and steel.

His career progressed in concurrent phases. For many years he was
both a lawyer and a literary man ; he was interested in politics early, but
did not emerge as a practical politician until the war, when he had
reached full maturity. As a lawyer he became an auditeur in the Conseil
d'fitat, the highest organ of the French civil service. It is a sort of su-
preme court of France which, though it cannot declare any law passed by
the parliament illegal, may pass on injustices in the application of a law.
Blum reached the high post of Maitre de Requetes, viz., solicitor-
general, in charge of the state’s cases. This was the top rank he could
achieve in the civil service.

But meantime he was inveterately occupied with literature and jour-
nalism. Articles, essays, books, came in subtle and distinguished prose
from his pen. He was a sort of literary man-about-town ; Mallarme,
Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Tristan Bernard, Jules Renard, Jules Le-
maitre, the Guitrys, Alfred Capus, Anatole France, were his friends.
Passionately fond of the theater, he was dramatic critic first of the
Revue Blanche, an avant-garde literary journal, then of the Matin, finally
of Comoedia, the "'official” theatrical newspaper. He wrote half a dozen
books, one on marriage — ^in which he expressed his belief in sexual
equality — one on Stendhal, one on Eckermann.

Across the life of this young lawyer-aesthete-philosopher was now
flung the massive shadow of Karl Marx. Mallarme left the boulevards
for symbolism; Anatole France retreated into irony; Blum became a
socialist. Two persons and one terrible fact combined to transform him
into what he has been ever since. The persons were Lucien Herr, the
socialist librarian of the ficole Normale, and the great Jean Jaures;
the terrible fact was the Dreyfus case. Convinced by Herr’s "incredible
and truly unique force” (the words are Blum’s) he became a Drey-
fusard; through Herr he met Jaures, the dynamic founder of modern
French socialism. Blum was still a dandy, precieux to his slim finger

DALADIER AND BLUM 159

tips; Jaures was historically uncouth, famous for spitting into his hand-
kerchief. The two were staunch companions through all the inferno of
the Dreyfus affair. Blum discovered in himself a passion not only for
the theater, but for social justice. He forgot his essays like Ltsant,
reflexions critique \ he read Sorel, Proudhon, and Marx. Jaures took
him into the streets, showed him people. Delicately— at first— he fingered
proletarian Paris. The enormous ebullience of Jaures taught him much.
And in 1906 Blum and Jaures together founded a daily socialist news-
paper, UHumanite,

So then politics. Blum wrote the leading article every day. Jaures
with the voice, Blum with the cutting pen; this was the partnership.
At first, still clinging to literature, Blum preferred purely literary par-
ticipation. Jaures asked him to stand for the Chamber; he refused. But
his friends say that at that time he could, out of his head, give you the
votes on any issue of every deputy, as an American baseball fan can
give batting averages. Just before the outbreak of the War Jaures was
assassinated. A month later Blum did finally become a politician, to take
up the Jaures mantle: not, however, in the manner of a subordinate
leader carrying on, but as a friend who wished to make a gesture in
memory of his friend. Blum was neither conspicuously energetic nor
ambitious. But Jaures was dead; Jaures had wanted him to go into
politics ; therefore he did. Almost at once he was appointed chef de cabi-
net in the Ministry of Public Works. This was Blum’s only actual ex-
perience of political administration before his premiership — ^twenty-two
years later — in 1936.

After the War he became a deputy from the Seine, though compara-
tively few socialists got in; it was a “khaki’’ election like the one in
England at the same time. He was beaten in 1928, and rejected — for
Narbonne — ^in 1929. The same year he became president of the parlia-
mentary group of the French socialist party. Meantime UHumanite had
become the communist organ ; Blum founded a new paper, Le Populaire,
To this, the official socialist newspaper, he contributed a daily leading
article, year in, year out. As socialist leader, he steadily and stubbornly
refused participation in the various Radical cabinets of the time. He
would not accept power, he said, without responsibility; he would not
accept responsibility without power. Then in May, 1936, the socialists —
for the first time — ^became the largest single party. Blum was offered
the premiership and accepted it.

INSIDE EUROPE

160

Blum lives on the lie Saint-Louis, facing the Seine in the oldest and
loveliest part of Pans. The legend that he is very rich is without founda-
tion. He has many books, and everything in the apartment is “a very
good choice,” as the French would say; but the elegance is by no means
sumptuous. Blum was supposed to own a famous silver collection, and
was, in fact, invited to lend some of it to an exhibition; he could not
do so because he had only enough knives and forks for his own modest
table. The Blums were interested in another apartment on the Quai
before they took their present home; it had once been occupied by
Paul Painleve, a former premier. The landlord said, *T’d be happy to
rent it to you, but I don’t like the swarm of journalists and politicians
who came to see Painleve, and I suppose you too will be President du
Conseil some day.” Blum replied that it was altogether improbable that
he would ever become President du Conseil, but he refused to sign a
clause in the lease saying so ; and the negotiations were broken off.

Mme. Blum, who died last year, was his second wife. He was devas-
tated by the loss. His first wife, a sister of the composer Paul Dukas,
died some years ago, after long illness. By her he had one son, now
employed in the Hispano-Suiza factory. The second marriage was child-
less. Mme. Blum was a Mademoiselle Therese Pereira, an important
member of the socialist party and a member of a firm of decorators.
The marriage was extremely happy, and Mme. Blum accompanied her
husband everywhere. At every political meeting she was with him, and
in the days preceding his premiership she was practically his chef de
cabinet. His secretary, nowadays, is — ^appropriately enough — ^named
Blumel.

When he was prime minister Blum worked at the Hotel Matignon,
on the rue de Varenne, the history of which is curious. It is one of the
most distinguished of the hotels particuUers of eighteenth-century
Paris, a stately house behind a high solid gate and graveled court, with
wide gardens and flowering trees. It was the Austro-Hungarian Embassy
before the War. When Flandin was French prime minister in 1933,
he discovered that unless the President du Conseil also held a ministerial
job, he had no office, no place to work. So a bill was prepared making
the Hotel Matignon the permanent headquarters of the prime minister,
like No. 10 Downing Street.

Blum’s method of work is a combination of apparent slipshodness
and actual precision. He is an inveterate note-taker. He writes every-
thing down, not only ideas as they come to him, but notes on other

DALADIER AND BLUM i6i

peoples’ conversation. An idea may arrive in a taxi, at a meal, during a
debate, in an airplane, during a conference. Out of the pocket comes a
notebook; the pencil cabalistically flies. If the notebook is not available,
Blum uses any odd bit of paper that may be handy, even a newspaper.
But everything must go down— in writing— and at once. These notes,
which are voluminous, are carefully checked, filed, and preserved. Many
are written at night just before he goes to bed. Out of them come his
speeches, essays, arguments.

His speeches, extraordinarily lucid, and in a French of grave purity,
give an impression of casualness, of extemporaneity. But behind them
is much careful preparation — and the notes.

Although he represents an agricultural and mainly wine-growing con-
stituency (Narbonne) Blum is almost — ^not quite — a teetotaler. He is a
convenable — ^i.e., quite normal — eater, not a famous gourmet, like Her-
riot. He smokes French cigarettes — '"grises Gitanes,'^ denicotinized —
which are mild and cost f r. 3.50 for twenty ; he needs a package or two
per day. He plays good bridge, but plays it seldom. He wears a big
black Latin Quarter hat. He loves conversation, and his friends are
legion.

Charm, fastidiousness, intellectual detachment and humanism, are not
Blum’s only qualities. There is, for instance, his supernal patience. I
have noted his long refusal to take office — ^until he could take it on his
own terms. Another example is the revolt of the ''Neo-socialists” in
1933. Three of his ablest associates, Marquet, Deat, and Renaudel, tired
of what they called his pontifical manner, his "theorizing,” demanded a
more active policy and the abandonment of socialist internationalism.
They stormed at Blum and finally quit him. Blum said little; he was
content to wait. To-day the "Neos” are forlorn and forgotten. Marquet
is still mayor of Bordeaux, but Deat is out of the Chamber, and Re-
naudel is dead.

Blum’s mind is salty, and he has great sense of phrase. Once Poincare
remarked, to a group of friends, "I smell war.” Blum said simply, "Let
him disinfect himself.”

His intellectual honesty is complete. "The free man,” he once told
Jules Renard, "is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.”

His manners are good, and he gets along with people, though at a
certain distance ; he was on thee-and-thou terms even with Laval. But
no one could accuse him of being a person of the corridors. His politi-

i 62

INSIDE EUROPE

cal discernment is, however, shrewd. As long ago as 1933, quietly, al-
most surreptitiously, he was feeling his way toward the Popular Front.

Until the summer of 1936, people invariably accused him of being
doctrinaire. He is not a good mob speaker, being far too rational and
precise. It is doubtful if he ever can become a popular hero and he has
yet to prove himself as supple as Briand, or as flintlike as Clemenceau.
He is not, most people think, a fighter. He has no shoulders: only
antennae. And most observers fear that he seriously lacks physical
stamina, which prime ministers notably need.-^

But at a time when most democratic politicians were objects of de-
risive laughter, when the general public in France was sick to death of
the venality, the inefficiency, the opportunism, the vulgar heroics of most
of the Paris politicians, Blum emerged with one supreme quality : namely,
that he commanded respect, that no one who knew him well could fail
to note and admire the disinterested honesty of his career and mind.

Just before becoming prime minister Blum and Monsignor Ma-
glione, the Papal Nuncio, crossed in the anteroom of M. Serrault. Msgr
Maglione expressed the desire to make Blum^s acquaintance. ‘‘Soon
I am leaving France,” he said (he was en route to Rome to become
a cardinal), '"and I cannot go without having shaken hands with Leon
Blum.” They talked for a minute or two. As Maglione took leave,
Blum remarked, "T don’t suppose I may dare to ask your benediction.”
The Nuncio reflected, then replied, ""I shall pray God to give you His.”

When Blum, on June ist, 1936, became prime minister of the Popu-
lar Front government, he was confronted at once with a first-rate crisis.
The Left rose. In strikes. The strikes, most competent observers agree,
were spontaneous in origin ; they were neither fomented nor organized
by either socialists or communists. Workmen in one industry after an-
other downed tools, in what was a sort of spirited epidemic, until pro-
duction all over France was paralyzed, with more than a million men
in occupation of the factories. Hotels, department stores, dockyards,
munitions plants, restaurants, mines, beauty parlors, shut down, in some
cases for a day or so, in some cases for several weeks. The Left, cele-
brating its victory, seemed to be showing Blum what latent power he
represented.

The strikes were a marvelous tribute to the good sense and restraint
of the average Frenchman. In an industrial stoppage as comprehensive
- Incidentally lie was badly beaten np by a royalist mob early in 1936

DALADIER AND BLUM 163

and drastic as anything seen in Europe since the war, not a tool was
injured, not a machine damaged, not a person hurt, not a single drop
of blood spilled. One of the most experienced of American correspond-
ents in France, Edgar Ansel Mowrer, cabled his newspaper that during
the tensest days he would not have hesitated to lead a girls’ school
through the slums of Paris. In the great department stores, men and
women slept on the floors — instead of the beds. They were underpaid
and often hungry — and never stole a cheese or opened a box of beans.

The strikes were a considerable asset to Blum, because they demon-
strated both the power and the discipline of the workers. They were a
cogent sign to the Senate if it should hesitate to pass his flood of bills.
Blum resolutely refused to use troops or government power to clear the
factories. This would only, he knew, cause bloodshed.

'T know the occupation is illegal,” he said, ‘‘but is it not better to
have the strikers sitting quietly in the shops and factories — ^where they
are doing no harm — ^than fighting the police, and probably the Fascist
Leagues, outside? The Garde Mobile and the troops might clear the
factories, but what would be left of the factories when they had
finished ?”

Thus the rational mind. But after the first week, with the movement
still spreading, it became necessary to show that the government could
and would, if necessary, take steps to force a return to normal. Blum
could not afford to let the situation out of hand. Thorez sounded the
word for the members of the communist unions to resume work. Roger
Salengro,^ the minister of the interior, announced that ‘‘future” stay-in
strikes would not be tolerated. Quietly, with good discipline, everyone
slipped back to his machine.

What helped end the strikes so promptly was, of course, the courage,
the comprehensiveness, and the speed of Blum’s reforms. He set about
an immediate realization of the Front Populaire program — ^which five
months before had been ignored as visionary. People saw that he really
intended fulfilling his political promises, and with a vengeance. On the
Right, mouths gaped with resentment — and astonishment. The Left pre-
tended that it was not astonished. Probably it was. Blum went far —
and fast.

A variety of minor bills occupied the government first. (This, inci-
dentally, included three women as undersecretaries, the first women to

® Who committed suicide in November, 1936, following a slanderous campaign
against him in the Rightist press.

INSIDE EUROPE

164

be given cabinet rank in French history.) The school-leaving age was
raised. The cabinet was reorganized into seven ‘"spheres,” to promote
economy and efficiency in administration. The Laval wage and salary
cuts were m part restored. A new regime for pensions was outlined.
A comprehensive plan for agriculture was announced. And, perhaps
recklessly, a bill was proposed to check the notorious venality of the
Paris press.

All this, however, merely touched the fringe. M. Blum had his eye on
bigger business. And three astonishing measures were passed in record
time. First, by an unprecedented majority (444 to 77), the Chamber
voted for the reform of the Banque de France, viz., curtailment of its
feudal privileges. The new bill abolished the old Regency council of
the bank and aimed to put the bank in its proper place as the servant,
not the master, of the country. Second, by an even greater majority,
484 to 85, the government passed a law for the nationalization of the
munitions industry. The initial cost was to be 1,000,000,000 francs. Noth-
ing quite like this bill has been seen in Europe before. Third, striking
boldly at his chief enemies, Blum put through an act for the dissolution
of those bad boys of the streets, the Fascist Leagues. Their tails between
their legs — at least for the time being — ^the members of the Croix de
Feu crawled home.

Then in October Blum took a step of profound importance; he de-
valued the precious franc. For seven years France had been hamstrung
by the gold standard, with industry all but ruined and the cost of living
appallingly high, but no French prime minister had dared the plunge off
gold. Blum took a deep breath and dived into the pleasant waters of
modified inflation. The franc eased off to nearly thirty per cent. Great
Britain and the United States joined to support the new figure, good
augury for future cooperation among the great democracies.

The Popular Front, as I have noted above, did not last long. While
it did last, a new energy, a new freshness, blew through France.

Camille Chautemps

Camille Chautemps, who took over from Blum, is much less a states-
man; he is a professional politician, with all the vices of that ilk: a
careerist, whose family has been a sort of radical dynasty since 1871.
The royalists call him TenSbreux/’ the shadowy; he is an acknowl-
edged freemason. Chautemps was seriously involved in repercussions
of the Stavisky scandal; he was minister of the interior in Stavisky's

DALADIER AND BLUM 165

big days, and his brother-in-law, Pressard, was head of the Paris parquet
(prosecutor's office) which let Stavisky off. The campaign against Chau-
temps in the Rightist press in those days was one of the most virulent
of modern times. A commission of inquiry subsequently cleared Chau-
temps of any connection with Stavisky. He was prime minister for a
brief interval in 1930, and again in 1934 between the first two Daladier
ministries. One thing he did may unfortunately live after him; he was
the first prime minister of France to resign without being voted out by
the chamber. Pressure of the February rioters forced him out. Chau-
temps, a native of Paris, was born in 1885 ; he was educated as a lawyer.
Some day he will probably be prime minister again.

Chdpter XI

French Policy — and Why

The friends of gold will have to be extremely wise and mod-
erate if they are to avotd a revolution,

— ^J. M. Keynes

The only way to treat a Prussian is to step on his toes until
he apologises,

— French Proverb

A ny French prime minister, until the provisional victory of the Front
^ Populaire, was a creature of the financial oligarchy. I have alluded
to the Banque de France in the preceding chapter. France for genera-
tions has been run by a group of about two hundred financial families
— ^the celebrated Deux Cents — ^whose central pediment was the Banque
de France. How this oligarchy traditionally worked should be described.
France, as the French said, was no longer a kingdom, but the Third
Republic was the pawn of the eighteen '‘regents'^ of the bank.

The Banque de France was founded by Napoleon I ; although it issues
the public money of France and holds its gold supply, it is a private
bank, not a state bank. By terms of its basic charter, which Blum at-
tempted to alter, only the two hundred shareholders with the most stock
are permitted to vote for the regents who up to now have controlled
the bank absolutely.

In 1933 there were approximately forty thousand shareholders in the
Banque de France; 17,889 shareholders held one share each, 9,021 held
two shares, 8,021 held four shares. All told, 24,931 small shareholders
held 68,015 shares. The remaining 115,485 shares were held by only
6,069 persons. Of these, the top two hundred alone had voting power.
They chose the regents.

These two hundred men, the cream of financial France, are an amaz-
ing plutocracy. They are as snobbish as a vintage sardine or a Suzanne
Talbot hat. Mere wealth cannot buy its way into this velvety inner circle.
The two most flagrantly conspicuous of modern French millionaires,
Coty the perfume man, Citroen the automobile manufacturer, were not

166

FRENCH POLICY— AND WHY 167

members of what is customarily called merely the '"oligarchy.” The
chosen insiders combine the hereditary distinction of family as well as
the contemporary command of wealth. They rise straight from pre-
Revolutionary times ; they were the upper bourgeoisie during Napoleon ;
they worked together, consolidated their power under Louis Philippe and
Napoleon III. The last person really "‘taken in” by the oligarchy is sup-
posed to have been Eugene Schneider, the steel and arms merchant,
about thirty years ago.

Of the eighteen regents of the Banque de France, three — ^the governor
and the two vice-governors — ^were appointed by the state. They had no
more voting power than the other regents, but in actuality a governor of
the Banque de France who disagreed with the private regents had little
recourse but to resign. By terms of the Code Napoleon, the governor
must possess one hundred shares of Banque stock, each vice-governor
fifty shares — and the current price of shares is 10,000 francs. Not many
civil servants of the French state had 500,000 or 1,000,000 francs to
spend. So, in practice, the custom arose whereby the other regents lent
each new governor the price of the necessary shares. When a governor
retires, he is usually ""taken care of.” Two recent ex-governors, Servent
and Luquet, went to the board of the Banque de TUnion Parisienne, a
big business bank formed to handle the commercial business of the pri-
vate bankers of the regency. Ex-governor Moret went to the Banque
de Paris et des Pays-Bas. Ex-Govemor Charles Rist went to that haven
of ex-presidents of the French Republic, the Suez Canal Corporation.

Three other regents of the Banque were by ancient custom civil serv-
ants representing the French treasury. They held office primarily to
oversee the treasury account. And they represented as a rule, an ex-
traordinary plutocracy within a plutocracy, that of the “Inspecteurs de
Finance” of the French civil service. These ""Inspecteurs” begin public
life by passing one of the stiffest competitive examinations in the
world. They are cultivated young men of good intellect and family.
There are only about eighty of them in France, and they are the top of
the permanent civil service. After years of training they become ""in-
spectors” ; later they become regents of the Banque, or they may resign
to take private positions in industry or banking. The eighty-odd ""in-
specteurs de finance” comprise a sort of financial general staff, scattered
— ^but closely knit — ^through the financial structure of the French re-
public.

The remaining twelve regents, representing private interests, were —

i68

INSIDE EUROPE

until Blum — the actual rulers of the Banque de France. They were sup-
posed to embody a cross-section of French finance, industry, commerce,
agriculture. Six of the twelve were bankers, all of them, in the absolute
sense of the term, '^hereditary” regents. Their seats were passed down,
father to son Of the six families represented, five came to France from
Switzerland in the eighteenth century to assist Necker in preserving
the finances of the Ancien Regime. The sixth seat was that of the
Rothschilds; Baron Alfonse de Rothschild became a regent in 1855.

The six "banking” regents were :

Baron Edouard de Rothschild. (Rothschild bank.)

Baron Hottmguer. (Banque Hottinguer.)

Baron Jacques de Neuflize. (Banque de Neufiize.)

M. Ernest Mallet. (Banque Mallet.)

M. David Weil. (Banque Lazard Freres.)

M. Pierre Mirabaud. (Banque Mirabaud.)

All of these banking firms are venerable private institutions, which
for centuries have administered the estates of the French nobility, besides
doing normal commercial business. They represent family d3masties.
For instance, Pierre Mirabaud succeeded his uncle William d'Eichtal,
who succeeded his uncle Paul Mirabaud who succeeded his grandfather
Adolphe d'Eichtal. M. Weil succeeded to the seat of Felix Vernes,
who had taken his piace after father and grandfather. The Mallets
have occupied a chair uninterruptedly for 109 years.

The final regents were traditionally chosen among ^‘manujacturiers,
fabricants (merchants), ou commergants'^ who were shareholders of
the Banque. They were *

M. Frangois de Wendel, steel merchant and arms trafficker.

M. de Vogue, chemical manufacturer and president of the Union des
Agriculteurs de France.

M. Rene Duchemin, chemical manufacturer.

M. Tmardon, industrialist.

M. Camille Poulenc, chemical manufacturer.

M. Robert Darbley, paper manufacturer.

The Marquis de Vogue, like the banking regents, represented the old
aristocracy ; his family for two generations has administered the Manu-
facture de Glaces de Saint-Gobain, the greatest chemical works in France.
M. de Vogue is also a director of Schneider et Cit, of Creusot, the great
arms firm, as is M. de Wendel.

Interlocking directorates among the banking and industrial regents

FRENCH POLICY— AND WHY 169

reached a point where these twelve men had one hundred and fifty
seats in ninety-five corporations, which accounted for at least sixty per
cent of the industrial output of France. They sat on the boards of thirty-
one private banks, eight insurance companies, nine railway companies
(four of which are foreign), eight navigation companies, seven metal-
lurgical corporations, eight electrical companies, eight mining companies,
twelve chemical companies.

Above all, the regents were part and parcel of that immense industrial
complex known as the Comite des Forges.

The regents of the Banque de France decisively controlled French
politics, because by withholding credits from the treasury they could
break any prime minister they didn't like. The Banque, which more or
less represents the Rentier class, stood for complete deflation. TJie much
maligned Chamber of Deputies, representing the man in the street —
and his pocketbook — opposed this. Thus the Banque could only gets its
way by taking the matter out of the hands of the chamber. The way to do
this was to obtain ''pleins pouvoir^’ (full powers) for a prime minister
it liked. For instance the Banque persuaded old Gaston Doumergue,
who headed France's ‘'National Government" formed after the Stavisky
riots, to demand such powers. The chamber promptly threw the fatuous
old gentleman out. The next prime minister was Pierre-Etienne Flandin,
and the Banque squashed him in six months.

Flandin, a man of the center, an honest fellow, refused to bow un-
conditionally to the Banque's will. He said, “We are given a choice:
deflation or devaluation of the franc. I refuse to let myself be tied up
in this dilemma." He proposed a third alternative, a policy of easier
money, gradual “reflation.” The Banque didn't like this and engineered
a plot to throw Flandin out. The prime minister retaliated by firing
Clement Moret, the governor. The bank thereupon refused to rediscount
government short-term loans. The new governor, Jean Tannery, was
a prisoner of the other regents. Pressure on the government from the
Banque became enormous. On June 15, the government had to meet a
big payment of government bonds, but it was penniless ; Flandin
was living hand to mouth by borrowings from the post-office savings.
Frenchmen, worried, feared inflation, began to buy gold and ship their
capital abroad. Blandly, the Banque let this go on. It could have stopped
the drain of gold, but it wanted to beat Flandin. Panicky, Flandin ap-
pealed to the chamber for the same pleins pouvoirs which he had previ-
ously refused to request. The chamber was naturally incredulous and

INSIDE EUROPE

170

overthrew him. The Banque, victorious, then easily plugged the leak of
gold. This was the inner history of the French financial ‘‘crisis'" of
June, 1935.

Laval became prime minister and obeyed the Banque implicitly in a
merciless policy of deflation. He did not, however, swallow whole the
program of de Wendel, chairman of the Comite des Forges, who wanted
four or five billion francs for “economic redressment," viz., gifts to in-
dustry in the form of lightened taxation and government subsidies. Taxes
went up. The Procrustes bed of deflation caught almost everybody. But
it is interesting to note how de Wendel had Laval at heel when the prime
minister asked the chamber for four thousand million francs for special
military credits. The chamber entered two amendments, (i) to limit
profits Of arms manufacture to five per cent, (2) to nationalize the arms
industry within a year. When Laval saw that these amendments would
pass, he withdrew the bill.

The de Wendel-Laval decrees outdistanced anything in the history
of the French republic for “encroachment on the field of private en-
terprise." The yield of government bonds was reduced ten per cent
by fiat; the government procured the right to fix prices and profits in
almost every branch of business, down to the corner bistro ; house rents
and mortgages were cut ten per cent by decree ; private borrowers were
permitted to reduce interest payments ; official salaries, wages, and pen-
sions were cut three to ten per cent; prices of coal, gas, electricity,
were deflated. Even so, the cost of living in France remained about
twenty-five per cent above the world level.

Why did the rentiers, the small capitalists, the peasants with sav-
ings, swallow such a program when devaluation of the franc might much
less painlessly lighten the burden? The reason was, of course, largely
psychological. The terrors of deflation were comparatively unknown;
those of inflation were known and doubly feared. Until the Front Popu--
laire France was dominated by a stick-to-gold psychosis, much like that
of the United States under Hoover. And it should not be forgotten that
the French capital-owning classes lost four-fifths of their savings when
the franc was reestablished on gold by Poincare.

Those who think that Fascism is exclusively a force operated for
personal advantage by industrialists confront a paradox here. France
is a democracy. But the industrialists of France have considerably more
power over political life in France than have German industrialists in
Germany. The point might well be made, were economics the only

FRENCH POLICY— AND WHY 171

index of Fascism, that France is a more '‘Fascist’' country than Ger-
many, where, by terms of a recent Hitlerite decree, no industry is
permitted more than six per cent profit. Yet to say that France is
Fascist would be preposterous.

Comite des Forges

FranQois de Wendel is a good many things besides president of the
Comite des Forges. He has, of course, his own steel business, “Les Petits
Fils de F. de Wendel et Cie.” The Wendels are an international family
and three brothers run the business ; one cousin, now dead, was a Ger-
man citizen until the War, calling himself not de but von Wendel.^
Frangois de Wendel is a senator, the owner of the Journal des Debats,
and part owner of the semi-official French organ, Le Temps. ♦

The Comite des Forges is the French steelmakers' trade associa-
tion, something like the Iron and Steel Institute of the United States.
It neither sells nor produces steel, but it dominates the policy of the
two hundred and fifty-odd producers who are its members, by allotting
quotas and setting prices. Of the companies in the Comite, probably
the best known is Schneider et Cie, of Le Creusot, run by M. Eugene
Schneider, who, like de Wendel, is of Franco-German extraction. The
Schneider firm was founded by a Saarlander, the grandfather of the
present Schneider, who settled in France in 1836. Schneider-Creusot
does not produce much steel, but it buys it from companies in the Comite
that do, and then transforms it into armaments.

If I am killed in the next war I hope they will put on my white
cross a notation that the bullet which killed me cost a fraction of a cent
to make and sold for three cents or more. Someone, I should like it
known, made a nice profit on my moldering bones.

Bullets do not cost much. But if you shoot one million rounds an
hour at $30 per thousand, the figures mount up. A rifle does not cost
much — ^perhaps $25. But equip an army of one million men, and you
have spent $25,000,000. A machine-gun costs about $640. The French
have about forty thousand of them. A 37-mm. field-gun costs about
$1,000, and each shell about $15. The famous French 75's come to
about $8,000 each. They are expensive and intricate, with fuses built
like watches. Their shells cost $25 each and in a single bombardment
some millions may be fired. A big tank, complete, costs about $80,000.

^ He was Ivan Edouard von Wendel (1871-1931), a cousin of Francois, not a
brother as is often said

172

INSIDE EUROPE

A bombing plane may diminish your budget $100,000. A modern cruiser
costs $11,000,000, an aircraft carrier $19,000,000, and a big battle-
ship almost $30,000,000.

Thus war, as we have good reason to know, is expensive. It costs us
money. We pay taxes. But war also makes money — ^for some — a lot
of money. Thus the munitions business, one of the strangest in the world.

The world, according to the League of Nations, spent $4,276,800,000
on armament in 1934, about $14,000,000,000 in 1937, and at least $17,-
000,000,000 last year. These sums are too astronomical for ready com-
prehension. Suppose I had that much money and spent it at the rate
of $10 per day. I should still have some left after more than a million
years. Suppose it should be transformed into a piece of tape, mile for
dollar ;•(: would go around the world 172,169 times. Suppose I had it in
gold pieces of $10 each and counted them at the rate of one per second;
the job would take 26 years!

The root of the munitions problem is the fact that only highly in-
dustrialized countries can profitably manufacture appreciable quantities
of arms. These countries sell to those less industrialized. Ninety-eight
per cent of the total arms exports of the world comes from ten coun-
tries; about sixty-five per cent comes from Great Britain, the United
States, France, and Sweden, the four greatest exporting countries.
France, typified by Schneider-Creusot, supplied in 1932 no less than
27 9 per cent of the world’s total output of arms.

Schneider-Creusot, like all great arms companies, is several things
— ^an arms firm, a myth, a steel works, a microcosm of the munitions
industry, a national institution, a nightmare to pacifists, an idol to
patriots, a military necessity to more than one country, and a whale of a
good business. The directors of Schneider and the other firms in the
Comite des Forges which do munitions business are quite mild-man-
nered gentlemen. They do not seem ferocious ; but their business is the
invention, manufacture, and sale of implements of death.

The arms companies are as incestuous as white mice. They play to-
gether and breed. This is because they are in a signal sense noncompeti-
tive; good business for one means good business for the others; ob-
viously if Schneider, say, gets a big order from Country X, other
companies will have a better chance of business from Country Y, which
is X’s unfriendly neighbor. As soon as one country buys a new military
invention, other countries must buy it also. Arms firms may underbid

FRENCH POLICY— AND WHY

173

one another for a contract in a single state; but internationally they
all stand to gain.

Extraordinarily interrelated and intertwined, the arms firms lace
the whole world in their net. Schneider and Vickers were connected
through Sir Basil Zaharoff, munitions salesman extraordinary. Schnei-
der for years controlled Skoda, the former Czechoslovak munitions firm,
through a French holding company, the Union Europeenne. The
Schneider interests were believed to control an Austrian bank also, which
was interested in the chief Austrian steel company, the Alpine Mon-
tangesellschaft. But the Alpine concern is ‘'owned” by the German
Steel Trust! And through a Diisseldorff firm, Rheinmetall, Schneider
is believed to be linked to Krupp.

It has long been known that French and German steel producers
had an unwritten understanding during the War not to bomb each other's
plants. Lorraine was the quietest sector in France for the whole period
of the War. French airmen were forbidden to bomb de Wendel hold-
ings in the Briey Valley, although their destruction would have saved
many French lives by depriving the Germans of use of their mineral
deposits. The same thing is happening again. A new steel company,
Lorsar, has recently been formed, of half-German, half-French capital,
with monopoly rights for the sale of some Lorraine steel. It was an-
nounced that a company associated with Lorsar was awarded an order
for two thousand five hundred tons of bar steel for use in the new
French fortifications on the western front. In the deal were both M.
Dreux,^ the vice-president of the Comite des Forges, and the German
industrialist Dr. Roechling. So German interests make money on French
national defense. Cannon is expensive; cannon fodder cheap.

It is, of course, an old story that arms firms maintain an extreme po-
litical impartiality in their business. They sell to each side in any war.
They sell to friend and foe alike. Pluck a bullet out of the heart of a
British boy shot on the Northwest Frontier, and like as not you will
find it of British make. Paul Faure, deputy in the French chamber,
is in possession of photographs showing representatives of Turkey and
Bulgaria buying arms at Creusot before the war which during the war

2 This gentleman, Alexandre Dreux, almost as important a figure as Schneider
or de Wendel, is president of the Soc, an. des Forges de Brevilly, director of the
Soc. des Acieres de Longwy, director of Soc. Lorraine Miniere et Metallurgique,
director of Les Ateliers de Construction du Nord de la France et des Mureaux,
director of the Societe des Mines de Valleroy, president of the Caisse Syndicale
d' Assurance Mutuelle des Forges de France.

174

INSIDE EUROPE

were used against French troops; he has also a precious picture of
Eugene Schneider on a yachting party with the Ex-Kaiser Wilhelm,
French munition traffickers helped arm Abdel-Krim in his Morocco
campaign against the French. The Turks used British cannon to beat
the British at the Dardanelles ; British battleships were sunk by British
mines.

There is money in war. There is money in fear of war. Schneider and
Skoda stocks skyrocketed on the Paris bourse from the time that Hitler
came to power in Germany. Skoda dividends, even in ‘‘depression”
years, reached twenty-eight and a half per cent. And in times of com-
parative tranquillity, the arms traffickers were not above fomenting war
scares. For details, one should read two remarkable pamphlets published
in London by the Union of Democratic Control, the Secret International
and Patriotism^ Ltd.

War scares are good; real wars will be better. Let there be no mis-
take about it. Arms dealers want war. They are hypocrites if they deny
this. War is to them what milk is to a baby. They fatten on it. They
fatten on it like pigs in corn.

One should not think, however, that Schneider-Creusot and the de
Wendels are more noisome specimens of the arms merchant genera
than those of other lands. France has its finger in the arms traffic pie;
so have many other countries, including such pacific states as Denmark
and Sweden. Schneider-Creusot is on the whole, slightly more savory
a company than several of its great competitors, including Vickers of
Great Britain. Vickers, at the moment, is probably the largest arms com-
pany in the world. And, remembering some of the disclosures of the
senate commission in Washington, one should recall the proverb about
glass houses.^

M. Blum was the first modern statesman to tackle the arms racket.
In 1937 it was announced that Schneider-Creusot would be nationalized.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — and Sterility

France is almost perfectly balanced between agriculture and industry;
it needs to import only a very little food ; it is infinitely less dependent

® One revealing incident occurred in London, and was largely hushed up in the
British press It was disclosed that Sir John Eldon Bankes, the eighty-one-year-old
chairman of the British commission investigating the arms traffic, was himself a
substantial shareholder in Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd, a company which
although not exclusively an arms firm is the biggest British manufacturer of ex-
plosives, chemicals, and poison gas.

FRENCH POLICY— AND WHY

175

on foreign markets than Great Britain or Germany; the backbone of
the nation is the petite bourgeoisie, the small landowner, the peasant
capitalist; industry feeds healthily on the iron beds of Lorraine; the
country is rich, even if the government is hard up— these are the perma-
nent economic realities of France.

There is another reality not quite so comforting. No Chautemps, no
Tardieu, no Herriot, no de Wendel, has power to change it. The para-
mount problem of France is not internal economics or finance. It is not
even the safety of the Rhine frontier, security against the great enemy,
Germany. It is a demographic problem — the falling birth-rate.

In 1934 in France there were 677,365 births, 638,525 deaths the sur-
plus of births was thus only about forty thousand. In the first quarter of
1935 there were ten thousand fewer births than in the corresponding
period of 1934. The birth-rate in 1934 was 16. r per thousand, and for
years it has steadily gone down; the death-rate was 15 i per thousand.
In Germany, by contrast, the birth-rate was 180, the death-rate only
10.9. The corresponding figiires for Italy are 232 and 13.1; for the
U.S.S.R., 44.1 and 26.1. Germany, on the average — even though the
German birth-rate, despite a temporary fillip following Hitler, is also
going down — ^has about 1,100,000 births annually. And France has only
700,000 — in a fruitful year.

No wonder France, with a population of forty-two million, looks across
the Rhine at Germany, with its eighty million, in trepidation and
alarm. No wonder Marshal Foch, in one of his lighter moments, sug-
gested that the only permanent solution of the Franco-German problem
would be the castration of some twenty million Germans.

The Watchword — Security

There are arms merchants in France, but in general the French are
the most pacific people in the world. The great mass of French rentiers
and small shopkeepers want no more war. It is interesting, as Frances
Gunther pointed out, to note the catchwords that come to mind in con-
nection with different nationalities. Deutschland uber Alles, for instance.
Germany on top of ever)^hing. “Rule Britannia,” for instance. The
equivalent for France is 'Wive la France/^ let France live. The French-
man doesn’t want to die; he wants to stay alive, keep his small shop,
cultivate his plot of land.

The French have what Lytton Strachey, alluding to Gibbon, called
the classic virtues : precision, balance, lucidity. They hate extravagance

INSIDE EUROPE

176

and sloppiness. They love order. Both the national habit of saving and
the political desire for security are functions of the same instinct; the
Frenchman puts his gold in a sock and his treaty at a frontier to satisfy
the same craving — ^for economy, for order. By order I do not mean the
compulsion to goosestep, but the inner harmony of activity in personal
and political life that rises from lucid, well-balanced intelligence.

France got a good deal out of the last war. All France wants is to be
permitted to keep what she has. I have written ‘'a good deal”; but in
reality did France get so very much? In proportion to their sacrifices
and to the total German losses, the share of the French was not unduly
great. Alsace-Lorraine; the Saar for fifteen years; the Syrian mandate
and the Cameroons; reparations. Well, Alsace-Lorraine was French
anyway, at least since Louis XIV; the Saar was duly given back to
Germany; the Syrian mandate has been an expensive nuisance; and
where, oh where, are reparations now?

For France, the “peace” of 1919 has not proved enough. Twenty years
later France again saw the terrible weight of German militarism leaning
against the fragile west frontier. The French have been invaded by
Germany thrice in a little more than a century. They don’t want to be
invaded again.

The war-guilt topic is complex. Of course France contributed to the
origins of the Great War. To say that Germany alone was guilty is a
monstrous exaggeration. Nevertheless, the German army was the ag-
gessor. Monsieur Briand and Herr Stressemann — ^it seems a long time
ago — once had a brief conversation on the subject:

“Well,” the old Frenchman sighed, “I don’t, of course, know what
history will say, but I am afraid you will have to agree that in 1914
Belgium did not invade Germany!”

France, a realistic nation, having suffered the loss of almost two mil-
lion war dead, having suffered unparalleled devastation and destruction
of property and human values, sought after the war to create a system
of defense, known as “security.” It comprised the following items :

The most powerful army in Western Europe.

The first formidable air force.

The greatest number of tanks and artillery.

The line of fortifications on the eastern frontier.

An immense munitions industry.

The second largest gold reserve in the world.

The League covenant and the Locarno treaties.

The demilitarization of Germany.

FRENCH POLICY— AND WHY 177

The military and diplomatic alliances with the Little Entente (Czecho-
slovakia, Jugoslavia, Rumania) and Poland.

The short-lived ‘‘Stresa Front"' with Italy and Britain.

These were among the spoils of victory, but soon they — spoiled. All
these items the French had. But soon the French saw that they were
not enough. And with reason. “France," it has been said, “was perfectly
prepared in 1914 for the war of 1871, and in 1937 France was perfectly
prepared — ^for the war of 1914." The League system was dealt terrible
blows by the Japanese in Manchuria, the Italians in Abyssinia. The
alliances with the Little Entente and Poland became a doubtful quantity.
Germany, by leaving the League of Nations, ended the “disarma-
ment" phase of international politics, and the “collective security” phase
which replaced it was neither collective nor secure. The Russian treaty
seemed valuable, but Munich killed it. Finally, the “Stresa Front"
collapsed when Great Britain signed the Anglo-German naval treaty
and when Mussolini began the Abyssinian war.

During the long Briand period, the French, albeit grudgingly, were
conciliatory to Germany in the mam. It was obvious to Briand that
Germany, a complex of sixty-five million people in the heart of Europe,
couldn't be kept down permanently, that a healthy Germany was the
sine qua non of general European stability. But what happened? Every
concession redoubled German chauvinism. The French evacuated the
Rhine ; the answer they got was the end of reparations. They granted
Germany equal military status; the answer they got was Hitler. They
gave Germany back the Saar; the answer they got was German con-
scription, plus Goering’s tremendous air fleet. They gave Germany
Munich; the answer they got was the seizure of Czechoslovakia and
Poland.

Unilateral denunciation of treaties has become a bit of a bore, the
French began to think. Suppose Spain should suddenly decide to demand
the Philippines back from the United States ! The French have submitted
to a permanent inferiority in one branch of armament, that is, they ac-
cepted the 1.75 naval ratio vis-d-vis America and Britain. Why could
not the Germans accept similar proportional inferiority? Should the
Germans get back all they lost simply by asking for it? If they dislike
the Treaty of Versailles, why did they sign it in the first place? What,
in short, was the use of winning the war, anyway ? Which is, of course,
and the honest Frenchman will admit it, the exact point : winning the war
brought little gain; no one won the war; winners were losers.

INSIDE EUROPE

178

French policy to the outbreak of the war in 1939 was based, as always,
on the necessities of defense. Since the Doumergue government, the
general staff of the army has been actually in the cabinet, first m the
person of Marshal Petain, then through General Denain, the air minister.
The Flandin government doubled the length of military service for con-
scripts. This was to counterbalance the meager cadres of the ‘‘lean years”
during the War, when fewer men were born to reach military age.

Diplomatically, France sought to follow the Barthou tactics, to keep its
allies in order through regional pacts within the League of Nations. The
French allies were, as every one knows, the “status quo” countries, the
“Haves” of Europe, those which got what they wanted by the war,
more or less: Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Rumania, Poland.
The conflict between these groups and the German-led “Have-Nots”
produced a vicious circle. The security arrangements of the “Haves”
stimulated the revisionism of the “Have-Nots,” threats of revision by the
“Have-Nots” then forced the “Haves” to stiffer standards of security.
French nationalism spurred German nationalism, and vice versa. The
hotter the Germans were to revise, the hotter the French got for the
status quo.

The new pacts France would have liked, on French terms, were the
following :

1. A western air pact. This would haxe extended the old Locarno to
immediate assistance by air to any signatory attacked, not merely France
or Germany. The advantage to France was a closer tie-up to England
and possibly Italy. To accompany it France wanted a security arrange-
ment in Eastern Europe, which Hitler — ^who might have signed a western
air pact alone — balked at, thus bringing the v/hole business to nothing.

2. A Danubian pact. This, if it could have been negotiated, would have
taken the form of a Franco-Italian guarantee of the present frontiers in
Central Europe, plus assistance of some kind for Austria. Germany op-
posed it, because of course it would have tended to prevent what Ger-
many wanted, Anschluss between Germany and Austria.

3. An “Eastern Locarno,” similarly guaranteeing the frontiers of
Poland, Germany, the U.S.S.R., and the Baltic States. The U.S.S.R.
was for a time eager for such a treaty, and made preliminary regional
pacts with the buffer countries. But both Germany and Poland — ^when
the Germans and Poles had their short interlude of working together —
opposed it.

A pact which the French did succeed in signing, and which was of

FRENCH POLICY— AND WHY

179

paramount importance so long as it lasted, was the Franco-Soviet
Treaty of Mutual Assistance of 1935. It was ratified by the French
chamber after furious deliberation, and became the chief bastion of
French security when Locarno died. Promptly it was associated with
the Franco-Czech and Russo-Czech security treaties, and it seemed that
a defensive league stretching right across Europe had been formed.
People came to talk about Collective Security and the "'democratic”
front represented by the French, the Russians, and the Czechs, in con-
trast to the Fascists.

The Franco-Soviet treaty, it is interesting to note, was negotiated
and signed, not by the Leftists of the Front Populaire, but by a highly
nationalist French government of the Right, It was the child of such non-
Bolsheviks as Barthou and Laval ; on a trip to Moscow, in fact, Laval
arranged it. The Germans, naturally, were furious at the Franco-Soviet
pact ; its signature was the pretext for the "invasion” of the Rhineland.
They countered, as we have seen, with both the Anti-Comintern pact
and the "Rome-Berlin axis.” As in 1914, conflicting treaties served to
split Europe into two camps, with the diJfference that in 1937 the op-
ponents were distinguished by ideological as well as national stigmata.
The Spanish civil war, as everyone knows, savagely illuminated this
cleavage of Europe into two mutually exclusive blocs.

For a time, immediately after Hitler came to power, there was some
fear that France might make a "cold” war, a preventive war, the theory
being that it was better to strike at Germany when she was compara-
tively weak than risk waiting for a war made by Germany when strong.
The idea fell flat, for the simple reason that France wouldn^t fight. No
government in France could get a single Frenchman to cross a frontier
in any aggressive war. But woe to the man who treads two feet inside
French territory.

Brass Check in France

One of the things which make France so hard for a foreigner to
understand is the notorious venality of the French Press. There are no
fewer than one hundred and two daily newspapers in Paris alone and of
the lot probably few except two are honest in our sense of the term, the
Action Frangaise, organ of the royalists, and Humanite, the communist
sheet. Most of the others, from top to bottom, have news columns for
sale.

One French paper, a minor rag called Bee et Ongles achieved the

i8o INSIDE EUROPE

truly remarkable stunt of being subsidized at the same time by the
French government, the Germans and Stavisky.*^ When the American
Ambassador Walter Edge arrived in Paris at the beginning of his term,
one of the editors of an important paper called on his secretary, hat in
hand, sure that the new emissary would appreciate the very best in
""publicite/^ A year or so ago in Barcelona, the leader of the Catalan
movement told me that he had had to pay another important paper to
print a series of articles describing S3mipathetically Catalan aspirations.

Paris papers may be subsidized by foreign governments, for instance
Japan and Italy. During the Japanese war in Manchuria the French
Press was, by and large, thoroughly pro-Japanese — ^and for a reason.
Italy, a competent authority estimates, spent about sixty-five million
French francs on French newspapers in 1935. In 1939 two important
editors were accused of accepting funds from Germany. The Press is
subsidized by the French government too. Both the ministry of foreign
affairs and the ministry of the interior have at their disposal huge fonds
secrets.

Esprit de France

France, above all, as Edgar Ansel Mowrer once said, is a success. Its
language, its literature, its culture, are the envy of the intelligent in
every country ; France is the most civilized country in the world. But
since the war the French have discovered that harmony, civilization, are
not enough. During the past fifty years the world has changed more
than in history, and it has isolated the perfection of French character.
The world is no longer bounded by the chaste walls of a room in the
Faubourg St. -Germain, or an apple orchard in Normandie, or a shop-
keeper’s neat, frugal premises in Lyons. The Frenchman sees the values
of his world changing, and he doesn’t know what to do about it.

More important in France than the figure of M. Leon Blum or M.
fidouard Daladier is the person of M. Jean Frenchman. France is a nation
of forty-two million individualists. What does the average Frenchman
think of the shattered world, the world slipping to a new catastrophe?
M. Jean Frenchman, since his country is a success, is a standpatter. He
is almost a stick-in-the-mud. His idea of a good time is to go fishing
and have a well-cooked dinner. His approach to things is, above all,
rational. He refused, for a long time, to believe that Hitler — ^for ex-
ample — ^was anything but crazy. He knows better now. But tell him that

^ Cf . France m Ferment, by Alexander Werth (p. 238) , an admirable book.

FRENCH POLICY— AND WHY i8i

Hitler is a prophet, and he will reply, skeptically, rationally, ^'Prophetef
II n’y a plus de prophetes/^

M. Jean Frenchman has lived on a volcano all his life. Three times
within living memory it has exploded. It may explode again He
grumbles, putters, and hopes — not very vigorously — ^for the best, mean-
time teaching his children, from the earliest ages, to be responsible. M.
Frenchman wants above all to be let alone. He wants nothing more than
to do nothing. He is no good except under pressure. ‘‘Everything in
France is at least twenty per cent better than it looks; everything in
Germany is twenty per cent worse,” Mowrer says. If war comes, M.
Frenchman will fight, and it will be hard to beat him, even if the perfec-
tion of his civilization has sapped much of his vitality. Rather than let
the Germans have what he owns, he will burn it if he cannot defend it.
Maturity isn’t necessarily decadence; and Germany learned that at
Verdun.

Chapter XII

More About Frenchmen

It is impossible to think of France except in terms of in--
dividuals.

— ^Andre Siegfried

G ermany is Hitler. But France is a whole lot of people. Six hun-
dred and eighteen of them are members of the chamber of deputies,
subdivided into bewilderingly numerous parties and groups. In the sixty-
eight years of the French republic there have been one hundred and three
cabinets, the average life being eight months. Living in France to-day
are fifteen ex-prime ministers each of whom, as long as he lives, must
be addressed officially as le President [^du Conseil] From one point
of view, France is the reductio ad absurdum of democracy.

Several factors cause this extreme political fluidity. For one thing, as
Siegfried says, the Frenchman wears his heart on the left, his pocket-
book on the right; therefore he is a creature of conflicting impulses.
Second, the parties and groups are not clearly demarcated as in America
or England. Politics is largely a matter of personality; deputies are
individualists rather than members of a rigid party machine, and many —
thirty-one in the present chamber — ^belong to no party at all.

The French electoral system is a combination of the British and
American, in that the chamber is elected for a stated period (four
years), but that the cabinet must resign if it is outvoted; the new cabinet
carries on under the old chamber, which is the source of much of the
confusion. There are so many parties that no single one can command
a majority; they combine in coalitions. The Left can seldom form a
Straight-Left ministry, but it is always strong enough to throw any other
ministry out.

“The nomenclature of parties,’^ Albert Guerard wrote, “is’’ — ^he put
it mildly — “perverse. The ‘Liberals’ are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives.

^ Paul-Boncour, Caillaux, Chautemps, Daladier, Doumergue, Flandin, Tardieu,
Herriot, Fran^ois-Marsal, Millerand, Steeg, Sarraut, Bomsson, Laval, Blum.

182

MORE ABOUT FRENCHMEN 183

The 'Conservatives' are revolutionary in spirit, tone, and method; the
'Social and Radical Left' belongs to the Right; the 'Radical Socialists’
are trimmers and time-servers; and the most reactionary statesman of
recent years, Millerand, was a socialist. French parties are not even
shadows. It would tax the subtlety of a Byzantine theologian to distin-
guish between the Democratic Alliance, the Republicans of the Left, and
the Republican Union."

But, mystified by the whirling rotation of French cabinets, the foreign
observer is likely to exaggerate its implications. The changes, the re-
shuffles. do not as a rule mean much. The civil service — the permanent
staff of each ministry — ^holds the fabric of government tight and secure.
The prime minister is titular rather than actual ruler of the country,
and often it hardly matters who he is ; behind him the bureaucracy car-
ries on.

As a matter of fact, there have been only six drastic changes in gov-
ernment in France since the War, the same number as in Britain. From
1919 to 1924 the Bloc National ruled, dominated by Clemenceau, Poin-
care, and the financial oligarchy; it gave way from 1924 to 1926 to a
Left coalition under Herriot, the Cartel des Gauches; Poincare returned
with the Union Nationale to save the franc from 1926 to 1929; a series
of Left coalitions, more or less antagonistic to the oligarchy and the
Banque de France, ruled roughly from 1929 to 1934; then came the
"National" period of Doumergue, Flandin, and Laval ; in 1936 arrived
the Popular Front.

Cutting across the political welter is one considerable issue, that of
religion. France is divided into two extremes religiously, the Catholics
and the Freemasons. The Catholics, the largest group, are nationalist,
conservative, strong in the oligarchy and strong in the army; some, like
the brilliant pamphleteers of the Action Frangaise, are royalists ; the bulk
of the Catholics are loyal to the republic, but on the Right.

The Freemasons, on the other hand, are largely represented in the
parties of the Left. Briand was reputed to be a Freemason; Herriot is
supposed to be one; Chautemps is. The Freemasons are alleged to
control the radical party; they are ferociously republican and anti-
clerical; they oppose the financial oligarchy and the banks. France is
the only country in Europe where masonry is a serious political issue;
the Right, for instance, exploited the Stavisky scandal as a "masonic"
plot.

184

INSIDE EUROPE

Lavduation

^There are five or six men in the world on whom peace depends. Destiny has
placed me among them.”

— PiEKRE Laval

Pierre Laval, Mayor of the tough Paris suburb Aubervilliers, senator
for the department of the Seine, former prime minister and foreign min-
ister, was born in 1883 in the village of Chateldon, in the Auvergne.
He is called '‘Le Bougnaf * — slang for Auvergnese — figuratively ‘‘coal
and wood man.’* The Auvergne is a deep fastness in south-central
France, made of granite as old as the earth; the Auvergnese are the
grimmest of French peasants, hard-working, shrewd, with primitive re-
flexes, close to the soil. All over France they are the coal and wood
dealers. There is a strong negroid cast of feature to many Auvergnese;
Laval has thick lips, heavy, black, oily hair.

Laval’s chief characteristic is his sense of the concrete, plus wiliness.
He is, as the French say, malin — a word for which there is no precise
translation ; it means a sort of worthy unscrupulousness, slyness without
evil. The joke goes that Laval was clever enough even to be born with a
name which spells the same backwards and forwards, left to right or
right to left. He rose from extreme poverty to wealth ; yet he is one of
the few French politicians untouched by financial scandal. He is supple
as a cat. Like a cat, he never attempts anything he is not perfectly sure
of; he calculates every jump to the inch. He gets out of things mar-
velously. He avoided all but rudimentary war service, on the ground
that he suffered from — ^varicose veins.

The great Briand, whose protege he was, said to him, alluding to his
slipperiness, “Alas, it is impossible to agree with everyone and M. Laval.”
Yet Laval is all things to all people. His manners in the lobbies of the
chamber are the quintessence of tact. He is a couloir (corridor) politi-
cian, a fixer, par excellence. He is unassuming, unpretentious; among
his friends are men in every party, journalists of every nation. He is on
thee-and-thou terms, people say, with more men than any personage in
France.

Not only is his capacity for friendship comprehensive; he treats one
and all with an unvarying shrewd and watchful eye. Laval is too sly
to trust anyone too fully. His character, in fact, embodies to a signal de-
gree the national French trait of suspiciousness. The story is that he
taps the telephone conversation even of M. Rochat, his chej du cabinet.

MORE ABOUT FRENCHMEN 185

His father, who is supposed to be descended from the Moorish in-
vaders of France, was the village butcher. Pierre did odd jobs as a
child, went to school, read voraciously, taught himself Greek. For two
years, when he was about nineteen, he was schoolteacher in the village.
Then he studied law, went to Paris, and entered politics. Nominally he
is still a barrister at the Paris court of appeals. In his comparatively
short period as an active lawyer he had few conspicuous cases ; mostly
he was an “inside” man on corporate work ; he was an indifferent pleader.
The great world of politics seized him — and here he pled well.

His career opened in 1914 when he was first elected deputy from
Aubervilliers, where he chose to settle down. He has maintained the
closest connection to this proletarian Paris suburb ever since. It is
strongly communist, but enough communists vote for him to keep him
perpetually mayor. He was up for reelection in 1935 while the govern-
ment was negotiating the Moscow pact — so the communists didn’t fight
him very hard. His constituency knows him universally as “Pierrot”;
he gets along with everybody, and the poor people of the districts like
his homely manners, his bad teeth.

He began political life as a violent socialist, and until at least 1922 he
was known as a man of the extreme Left. Since then he has moved
steadily Right, until now he occupies a center position. He belongs to no
political party, and describes himself as “independent.” It is not quite
fair to say that socialism brought Laval to power and that he then
kicked it over, as did other notable French politicians. Laval was never
an orthodox party man. He was a lone wolf, on the make. The story goes
that after a split in the socialist party in Tours in 1920, when he voted
with the majority that favored affiliation with the Third (Communist)
International, he took membership in both the socialist and communist
parties P

He was a passionate pacifist at the beginning of his career, when paci-
fism took real courage. His name was in the famous “Carnet B” of the
ministry of interior ; he was called a “dangerous” anti-militarist. He re-
fused to volunteer in the French army, and on being drafted he served
as a common poilu—iox a very brief time. His pacifism made him popu-
lar with the disaffected infantry in the black middle period of the war.
In 1916 he cried out in the chamber, “Except for [Tsarist] Russia, we
shouldn’t be at war at all !” A year later, referring to the socialist peace

* For a time, too, according to Robert Dell (cf. Nation^ October 28, 1931 )» h®
joined an abortive “communist-socialist party, which, however, never spread be-
yond the working class districts of Paris and soon died.

i86

INSIDE EUROPE

congress in Sweden, he shouted, '"Stockholm is the pole-star of our
hopes.”

He lost his deputy’s seat in 1919, and remained in the political wilder-
ness till 1924. Then his qualities as a negotiator boosted him suddenly to
cabinet rank. The Cartel des Gauches (Left coalition) was undergoing
one of its frequent shuffles, and Laval acted as an intermediary between
Paul Painleve and Briand and Caillaux ; as reward, he became minister of
public works. Caillaux lived in his house, Briand liked him, and when
Briand became prime minister, Laval was first appointed his general
secretary — z. valuable key post — ^and later minister of justice.

Then the Left coalition crashed and during the Poincare r%ime Laval
was very much out in the cold. He was far too Leftish — ^still — ^for the
harsh, legalist Poincare. This taught him a lesson, md he cultivated the
friendship of a man distinctly not on the Left — ^Andre Tardieu. And
when Tardieu formed a cabinet in 1930, Laval was his minister of labor.
Laval played with Briand and Tardieu both. In January, 1931, he be-
came prime minister — ^at Briand’s urgent intercession — ^and included
Tardieu as minister of agriculture by sacrificing Left support. His first
premiership lasted thirteen months — a, long time for France.

Laval, among other things, went to Berlin, the first French prime
minister to visit Germany since the war. All things to all men, it looked
as if he intended to be all things to all nations too. The Germans gave
him an imposing reception.^ In June, 1931, he showed the world his
stubbornness in haggling for seventeen bitter days before France ac-
cepted the Hoover moratorium. In October he went to America — ^the
first French prime minister to do so — ^and talked to Hoover at Rapidan.
Meanwhile, the influence of Briand was waning. The Old Man of Peace
was sick and tired, but reports that Laval deliberately undercut him are
not true. The two men had great regard for each other, and Briand was
too ill to work; when in January, 1932, he resigned, Laval naturally suc-
ceeded him as foreign minister.

But the next month Laval himself went out of office. The frugal
French grudged him his free trip to America. And he had angered the
all-powerful Banque de France, because he insisted that France stick to
the British pound, and when the pound went off gold (partly as a re-
sult of Laval’s long haggle over the Hoover moratorium), the Banque

* But the story is that Briining, then chancellor, careful to risk no hostile demon-
stration at the station, filled it with several thousand detectives and their wives —
disguised as the cheering populace.

MORE ABOUT FRENCHMEN 187

de France lost $100,000,000 on paper. So he went. This taught him a
lesson, as we shall see; the next time he became prime minister he lis-
tened to the Banque more carefully. He was ‘'out'' two and a half years.
In October, 1934, he became foreign minister after Jugoslav bullets and
the lack of French first-aid killed Barthou at Marseilles; in June, 1935,
he became prime minister again, when the financial oligarchy vanquished
his friend Flandin.

Laval is a bad speaker, and he never talks in the chamber unless it is
absolutely necessary. He keeps his left hand in his trousers pocket and
saws the air with his right hand. His oratorical delivery, say the sophis-
ticated critics of the lobbies, lacks ‘‘elegance.” But elegance is the last
quality this swarthy peasant's son would pretend to. And why worry
about public talk in the chamber when private whispers just outside are
more effective?

Laval is probably the only important man in French public life who
has never written a book, and the only one whose final ambition is not
to become a member of the Academie Frangaise. He is not like Blum or
Herriot, passionately erudite. His intellect is that of an engineer, not a
scholar. He dislikes abstractions, and he has little use for art, science, or
pure literature. He is a lawyer, but he cares nothing for legal forms.

But Laval, a typical Frenchman of the middle class — ^not a Parisian —
is quick, shrewd, logical, practical, and lucid. Compare his intelligence
to that of a German, for instance Rosenberg. Rosenberg is, as Dorothy
Thompson once said, a man of great intelligence who is also a complete
fool : like so many Germans, he is both brilliant and incredibly stupid ;
he is capable of erecting dialectical structures of extreme brilliance upon
hypotheses which a child could knock apart. Laval is at the other ex-
treme. He thinks not only with his head but with his finger-tips.

Every German has a sense of national mission. Every Frenchman,
like Laval, has a sense of individual destiny. Scratch a German, and you
find a sheep; scratch a Frenchman, and you have an anarchist. “Re-
move liberty from Germany,” Frances Gunther wrote, “and you unite
the country ; remove liberty from France, and you have a revolution.”

A famous mot is attributed to Clemenceau. “Briand,” he said, “knows
nothing, understands everything; Poincare knows everything, under-
stands nothing ” Laval is in the middle ground He knows a lot, but not
everything; he understands even more than he knows, but he admits

i88 INSIDE EUROPE

limits to his understanding. He loves to reconcile opposites. And he has
one trait excessively rare among politicians : he is not vain.

Laval married a woman from the Auvergne, who, like the wives of
most French politicians, takes no part in public life. The Lavals, in
Paris, live in the little impasse Villa Said, next door to Anatole France's
old house. He prefers the country to Paris, and often returns to Chatel-
don, his birthtown, where, the local boy who made good, he owns an im-
posing chateau. Even during cabinet crises he tries to get out of Paris
for the week-end. He has two or three country estates, including a
stock farm in Normandie at La Corbiere. His attractive daughter, Jose,
the wife of Count Rene de Chambrun, is his constant companion.

Laval has no vices — except perhaps that since his doctor told him he
must cut down on cigarettes, he now smokes a mere eighty per day. He
still wears the kind of white tie that he adopted back in 1914— because
white ties don't fade and are washable.

He had, it seems, no taste for the prime minister's job in June, 1935.
He much preferred to stick to his chosen field of foreign affairs where,
indeed, his record was much brighter. He assumed the premiership only
with great reluctance, because he knew that he could not last, whereas
as a foreign minister his tenure would be longer. It is his life's ambition
to be the great and permanent foreign minister of France, to effect
French security by long-range settlement with England, Italy, and Ger-
many.

He took the foreign office just after Barthou had been busy patching
up some badly broken French fences in Central Europe, thus annoying
the Germans. The Saar plebiscite was coming soon and Laval did his
utmost to appease Hitler by a strictly reasonable, businesslike conclusion
to the Saar problem. His policy was sensible : he knew the Saar was in
any case bound to go to Germany, and he decided to give it up with
extreme good grace. Generosity, in the circumstances, cost nothing.

Then Laval went to Rome, and in January, 1935, concluded his fa-
mous arrangement with Mussolini, which, it was announced, settled all
outstanding difficulties between France and Italy. He gave Mussolini
some worthless sand in Libya; in return he got promises of joint Franco-
Italian action in Central Europe. But these celebrated conversations with
Mussolini gave him plenty of trouble later, because when the Abyssinian
war began, the Frenchman was torn between his promises to Mussolini —
who assumed that Laval had given him a free hand in Abyssinia — ^and
the burning necessity to keep on good terms with Britain within the

MORE ABOUT FRENCHMEN 189

League of Nations fold.*^ Laval went on, the story said, trying to save
^'both his faces/’

Then the sanctions quarrel — ^plus domestic intrigue — ^finished him. At
least for the time being.

Big Brother oj Lyons

Edouard Herriot, the Mayor of Lyons, a strenuous idealist, was for
years leader of the radical-socialist party, the second largest in the
French chamber. This party is neither very radical nor socialist, and
Herriot, a copious enough personality, signalizes well its aims, tempo,
and limitations. He is always a power, because the average Frenchman
is a radical.

He was born in Lyons, in 1872, and still lives there; he has been
Mayor of Lyons uninterruptedly since 1905. When local opposition is
serious, he descends on the town council, weeps and wails, and gets re-
elected by making it ashamed of itself for even daring to consider any
other candidate. He was a poor boy, largely self-educated. He became
a teacher, then a professor at the University of Lyons, finally a deputy.

He is a great artist in the emotions. Sometimes this leads him to
bizarre excesses of pathos. ^^Gentlemen,” he said, with tears streaming
down his cheeks, ^'we must not quarrel over the bedside of our sick
mother (France),” when he and Poincare furiously bickered after the
debacle of the franc in 1926. He is very fond of placing his hand on his
heart and declaiming about his warm virtues. He gets a lot of kidding
for it.®

The antithesis of the lean, dry, acrid Poincare, Herriot is a tower of
massive flesh, given to indulgence. A friend of mine had a "snack” with
liim — ^just a bite — ^recently at Geneva; he ate soup, two trmtes hleues, a
partridge, considerable quantities of vegetable matter, dessert, and cheese,
washed down with two full bottles of burgundy. But he attributes his
good health to the fact that he is a total abstainer from alcohol, viz.,
any alcohol except wine and beer.

Herriot first became prime minister in 1924, and his government set
out to reverse the revanche politics of Clemenceau and Poincare. Europe
looked up with hope and interest. Herriot— and MacDonald across the
Channel — seemed symbols of a new and conciliatory era. Herriot in

^ For the Hoare-Laval plan, see Chapter XV below

® Cf. Not to he Retreated, p. 259, Cartoonists like to portray Herriot as a traiw-.
parent body with six or seven Hearts.

190 INSIDE EUROPE

particular, robust, expansive, scholarly, benign, generous, suggested to
nationalist Europe the France it had forgotten, the France of the classic
humanities of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the ideals of the great Revolution.

For a time he flourished on the reversal of and Pomcarism. He set
about to reach an agreement with England— Franco-British relations
were then severely strained— and to conciliate Germany by settling the
reparations question. Two months after the formation of his ministry
the Ruhr was evacuated and the Dawes Plan went into operation. This
seems small potatoes now; but it was a literally tremendous achieve-
ment. Herriot gave Europe a new start. He initiated the policy which
has dominated French foreign politics ever since — ^reliance on the League
— ^when the League behaves itself.

Much later in 1930, Herriot was still battling with disarmament plans
which might entice the Germans into a peaceful policy. Fittingly, he was
the negotiator of the Lausanne settlement, which ended reparations —
and closed a gloomy post-war chapter. He was the first French prime
minister to get on good terms with the U.S.S.R., and as far back as
1932 he signed a Franco-Russian non-aggression treaty. He thought that
France ought to pay its debt to the U.S.A., and lost office when the
frugal French, like the normally honest British, thought that this idea
was nonsense.

As disillusion came to Herriot, his idealism, his good faith, became a
little tarnished. Inevitably, like most liberals, he had made some consider-
able straddles and compromises. He took office in the Doumergue na-
tional government, even though his party did not. One would have ex-
pected him to denounce the gold standard and Laval’s humiliating
dependence on the banks. But he took office under Laval too. This, his
friends say, was so that he might the better watch Laval at Geneva, keep
him in proper order. His ambition is to be President of the Republic,
but, as we have seen, Daladier blocked him.

Herriot can make a speech, and a magnificent speech, though his very
delivery is orotund and portly, on any occasion, extemporaneously. He
was crossing on the lie de France after his American visit in 1933, with
Paderewski a fellow passenger, on a day that happened to be the Polish
national holiday. The ship’s company persuaded Paderewski to play;
lights were kept low so that no one could see the old man, suffering
s^onies from rheumatism, too closely. Paderewski, barely able to lift his
hands to the keyboard, played all his runs glissando, but he played them
beautifully. Herriot, as was inevitable, had spoken, introducing him. His

MORE ABOUT FRENCHMEN 191

speech was quite on a par with the music. At the end, anyone in the
audience not knowing him would have thought him a Pole.

He is, like many French statesmen, a man of profound erudition and
very nearly first-rate literary style. The sing of a sentence, the lilt of a
sly adjective, the passion of an unexpected verb — these are matters al-
most as dear to his heart as the sauce of the quenelles de brocket at his
favorite restaurant in Lyons. Herriot has written several books, and they
are admirable. One was a study of Mme Recamier, Another was one of
the best biographies of Beethoven ever written.

The Former Fusiliers

Eugene Frot, a youthful lawyer with lively black eyes and a vivid
black beard on his lean jaws from ear to ear, was minister of the interior
in the ill-fated Daladier government that was swept from office by the
February, 1934 riots. He was known, even then, to be among the young
radicals heartily bored with the crise de parlemenfarisme, with the scan-
dalous inefficiency of the routine of French government. People called
him a ‘"young Turk,’" or even a “Fascist of the Left.” He was the bad
actor of February 6, who brought the crisis to a head by causing the dis-
charge of Chiappe, the Corsican who was chief of police. It is also said
(by Chiappe) that Frot was flirting with the Croix de Feu, and threat-
ened to come on the streets with his own equipe — ^team. And charges
are also heard that this romantic and complicated young man, who as
minister of the interior was responsible for public order, himself deliber-
ately fostered trouble between Left and Right, hoping that a street riot
would result — so that he could intervene at the proper moment as the
“savior” of— democracy. The royalists always call him the “assassin.”
Once they doused him with a bucket of butcher’s blood at a public
meeting.

Another of the “fusiliers” was Pierre Cot, minister of air in the Dala-
dier and Chautemps governments. Thin, meager, unimpressive physically,
a scholar, he has considerable executive ability. The first thing he did on
becoming air minister was learn to pilot a machine. He kept office in a
good many cabinets, because he had the arduous task of tidying up the
Aero-Postale scandal and reorganizing French civil aviation on reason-
ably efficient lines. He seemed indispensable at the job, but the riots of
February 6 swept him away. The Right hates him, and has accused
him of having disclosed French air secrets to the Russians.

With Daladier Cot joined the socialist-communist United Front. On

192 INSIDE EUROPE

July 14, 1935, he appeared at the monster Front Populaire demonstra-
tion at the Place de la Bastille, sitting atop a motor-car with an enor-
mous tricolor above him ; beside him was another car flying a red flag,
equally huge. The crowds, greeting him, shouted ^ V ive le dictateur !
Daladier, by contrast, walked in the ranks with the leaders of the march.
Hundreds saw Daladier; thousands saw Cot. Even so, most folk did not
think Cot would go too far.

Caillmx

Old Joseph Caillaux is seventy-seven. At the end of 1939, it was a
surprise to many who recalled the scandal of 1913, when his wife mur-
dered Gaston Calmette, editor of Figaro, that he was still alive — ^and
not only alive, but an important factor still in French politics. Caillaux
is one of the top men in the radical-socialist party, as influential in his
way as either Herriot or Daladier ; and he is presiding officer of the im-
portant Senate finance commission.

Caillaux is arrogant, neat, vain, precise, clear-headed and a dandy.
He is either violently reverenced or violently hated by the young. He was
one of the few men in France courageous enough, during the war, to as-
sert that both vanquished and victors would be ruined; as a result,
Clemenceau had him jailed for ‘^complicity with Germany.’’ He was not
tried till 1920, when, adjudged guilty by the Senate of “imprudent con-
versations,” he was deprived of political rights for five years and of the
right to enter Paris — ^^interdiction de sejour/* a judgment usually re-
served for white-slavers, drug addicts, and thugs. Caillaux, a millionaire,
and a man of the highest culture, was amnestied by Herriot in 1924.

PauUBoncour and Other Radicals

When the Action Frangaise does not call Joseph Paul-Boncour, the
greatest lawyer in France, “Don Juan of Lavabo,” it calls him “Paul-
Arlette-Boncour” — ^because, it seems, the eminent jurist once had the
honor of the acquaintance of Arlette Simon, the surprisingly beautiful
wife of Serge Stavisky. When she was ill in hospital — before the scandal
broke — ^he was one of two ministers who visited her.

Paul-Boncour, an old parliamentary hand, began politics as a socialist,
then founded a short-lived party of his own. He looks like a Michel-
angelo angel — a fallen angel, perhaps. Over the massive carved head is
the great mane of carved white hair. As foreign minister, he was too
tender with Germany for the French general staff and almost lost his

MORE ABOUT FRENCHMEN 193

job. He made marvelous speeches at Geneva; but he forgot to meet
Colonel Beck, the Polish foreign minister, at the railway station, mor-
tally affronting him.

Of the other radicals little need be said. Albert Sarraut, former prime
minister, is a communist-hater and old-style political careerist. He gave
Chiappe the job of chief of police when he was Poincare’s minister of
the interior. . . . Georges Bonnet, the foreign minister whose disastrous
policy led France to Munich, had the misfortune to take lunch with
Stavisky at Stresa, in 1930. He denied having done so, therefore the Ac-
tion Frangaise simply calls him ''Bonnet le Menteur^' (liar). . . .
Henri Cheron, a frequent finance minister, was the man whom Philip
Snowden, at The Hague, called “grotesque and ridiculous.” And when
Snowden accepted a peerage, the French papers were quick and neat to
headline the story: “Viscount Snowden — Grotesque and Ridiculous.”
. . . Albert Dalimier was the minister in the radical cabinet who unwit-
tingly caused the Stavisky explosion by recommending the Bayonne
bonds. . . . The party threw him out — ^too late.

Tardieu Getting Old

Andre Tardieu, “The Shark,” born in 1876, the most representative
French politician of the Right, is a Parisian ; the countryside, which is
the bedrock of France, has always distrusted him, and this may have
something to do with the comparative failure of his career. Too ambi-
tious, his life never quite fulfilled the promise of his exceptionally bril-
liant youth, though he has been prime minister three times. He was first
in his class at the ficole Normale Superieure ; he was first in his exami-
nations for the diplomatic service; he was chef de cabinet of a prime
minister (Waldeck-Rousseau in 1899) at the astounding age of twenty-
three.

For twelve years, 1902 to 1914, Tardieu was a journalist, principally
for the Temps, Figaro, and Revue des Deux Mondes. It is quite possible
that he was the most brilliant journalist in the history of modern France.
During the same year he was professor of history at the School of Polit-
ical Science and the ificole Superieure de Guerre. He wrote six volumes
of contemporary history. He only entered politics — as a deputy — ^in 1914
— ^and spent most of the early part of the war at the Front; he was
wounded, poisoned by gas, cited in army orders, decorated, Clemenceau
took him up. From about 1917 on he was Clemenceau’s man, first in
the United States as high commissioner — ^where his excellent manners.

INSIDE EUROPE

194

chic, good English, and brilliant social sense made him very popular-
then as a delegate to the peace conference and minister for the liberated
regions.

Much of the life of this markedly (otherwise) attractive personality,
this remarkably astute (otherwise) and intelligent man, has been shad-
owed by pervasive scandal. Once in the chamber a fellow deputy said,
'There are certain individuals whose dishonesty is universally recog-
nized but who remain unpunished. You, M. Tardieu, are the last man
in the world who has the right to accuse another man of being a thief.”®
Whenever Tardieu annoys the socialists in the chamber, which is often,
they shriek “Homs-Bagdad I” or "N’goko-Sangha” — ^bizarre names, dif-
ficult to pronounce, but resounding.

Homs-Bagdad refers to a consortium before the war which sought to
obtain a concession from Turkey for a railway in what is now Iraq,
Tardieu is accused, first, of having been "influenced” to praise the con-
sortium in the Temps, second of having exerted improper pressure on
the French ambassador in Constantinople, who opposed the concession-
naires ; a young man involved in the case, an official of the Quai d’Orsay,
went to jail for two years for stealing plans from the official files.

N^goko Sangha refers to a concession in the Congo. Tardieu, it ap-
pears, was interested in it as far back as 1911, when the conduct of the
company provoked a scandal. In 1919, as a delegate to the peace con-
ference, he persuaded Clemenceau to insert in the Treaty of Versailles
a clause indemnifying the N'goko-Sangha owners for losses during the
war — a purely commercial bit of business which should not, of course,
have figured in the treaty of peace at all.

One Tardieu cabinet was overthrown because of the Oustric bank
scandal, but the parliamentary inquiry showed that Tardieu himself had
nothing to do with Oustric. He had once dined with Oustric ; but so had
Leon Blum, on the same occasion. Tardieu was mentioned three years
later in the Stavisky case, because among the swindler’s check stubs
was one written "Tardi . . . 300,000 francs.” But it was later proved
that this was a joke; it had no reference to Tardieu.

After he had tried to break up Doumergue’s national government by
attacking the radicals, Tardieu resigned his office as minister of state
and spent most of his time in retirement. The report is that he is not
well ; doctors are supposed to have given him only a limited span of life.
Tardieu, on the Right, like Daladier, on the Left, is contemptuous of

« World Diary, by Quincy Howe, p. 25.

MORE ABOUT FRENCHMEN 195

present parliamentary procedure. He has said that he will never accept
office in a cabinet constituted on the present basis. If France should go
Fascist or semi-Fascist, then Tardieu may become an important — ^and
dangerous — ^man again.

The Grand Inquisitor

One of the most remarkable of French political characters, also on
the Right, though he calls himself independent, is Georges Mandel, whose
real name is Jeraboam Rothschild. He was Clemenceau’s first assistant
in 1917-1918 and since the Tiger devoted himself exclusively to the war,
Mandel, those two years, practically ran France. Until 1934 he was a
sort of invisible Richelieu, an eminence grise behind the scenes ; he knew
everything, he forgot nothing, and the chamber quaked when he rose to
talk. He refused to take formal office — any premier would have been glad
to have him — ^until Flandin persuaded him to be minister of posts and
telegraphs. Literally as well as figuratively, Georges Mandel could listen-
in on anything in France. As a result, he became a taciturn and formida-
ble encyclopedia on the secret life of the Third Republic. And his power
is great.

Mandel is supposed to have intrenched himself with Clemenceau when
he first asked for a job on the Tiger’s newspaper. "‘You are an ugly rat,”
said Clemenceau. ‘‘So I can see in that mirror,” Mandel instantly replied
— ^pointing to the glass opposite the Tiger. Clemenceau made him foreign
leader-writer because he knew nothing of foreign affairs. “Mandel,” he
said once, “your articles are not stupider than others. But they are com-
plicated. Hereafter, you may use merely one subject, one object, one verb
in each sentence. The object must be direct. If you use an indirect object,
consult me first.”

Then for fifteen years Mandel pursued many indirect objects — but
not in literature.

Paul Reynaud and The Center

Another highly important personage in the political life of France is
Paul Reynaud, born at Barcelonette in 1879, ^ lawyer and long-time
deputy, who was Tardieu’s minister of finance and Laval’s minister of
colonies. Reynaud, able and ambitious, a son-in-law of the great Parisian
barrister Maitre Robert, had a kind of double foreign policy for a long
time ; he was an ardent nationalist, and at the same time wanted Franco-
German rapprochement. In 1935 he made a notable speech opposing I-aval

INSIDE EUROPE

196

on the Abyssinian deal; he said it was madness for France to alienate
Britain for the sake of Mussolini’s doubtful friendship.

Reynaud is a member of what is known as the Democratic Alliance,
but he has never taken much interest in party politics. He is, and always
has been, a lone wolf, though for a time he was more closely associated
with Flandin than any other politician. When Flandin took a pro-Munich
policy, Reynaud resigned from his group. Re3maud set about the reor-
ganization of French finances and economy when he became Daladier’s
finance minister. He sought to find a path midway between Laval and
Blum. When war came in 1939, Reynaud initiated the closest possible
financial and economic collaboration with Great Britain. He even talked
in terms of customs union and common currency.

Reynaud is a deputy from a Paris constituency. He is one of the most
brilliant living Frenchmen. Should Daladier be displaced, Reynaud is re-
garded as his probable successor.

The Center in French politics, says Siegfried, is not so much a point
of natural concentration in French politics, but a watershed dividing Left
from Right. The most t3rpical man of the Center is probably Pierre-
Etienne Flandin. Not a true leader, not a dynamic human being, he has
commendable qualities : industry, a sense of balance, great technical pro-
ficiency in matters of economics and finance. He ruined his career, how-
ever, during the Munich crisis, when he took an extreme pro-appease-
ment and pro-Hitler line.

Flandin is called the Skyscraper ; he is six feet four, and solidly built,
zoned almost like a building. He was — at forty-five — ^the youngest prime
minister in the history of France. He was a flyer during the war. Though
on the Center, he is a devout republican ; though his family is rich with
affiliations of heavy industry, he is no warm friend of the oligarchy. In-
stead of reading the papers in the morning, he listens-in to a seven-fifteen
A.M. broadcast while shaving ; on becoming premier he set up a special
telephone hookup so that his own Surete Generale (more or less secret
police) couldn’t tap his messages.

The Jesuit Warrior

General Maxime Weygand retired as inspector-general of the French
army when, early in 1935, he reached the age of sixty-eight. When war
came in 1939, this peppery and shriveled little military priest, the man
who, in 1922, wrought the “Miracle of Warsaw,” was too old to fight

MORE ABOUT FRENCHMEN

197

again. He was active in diplomatic life however; he helped negotiate the
new Anglo-Franco-Turkish Treaty.

Weygand entered St.-Cyr, the French equivalent of West Point, d titre
Stranger (as a foreigner, since he was bom in Belgium; rumor will not
die that he was an illegitimate son of King Leopold II, the Belgian king).
Joffre appointed him chief-of-stafF to Foch after the first battle of the
Marne, and he remained Foch’s "right hand’’ (as Foch called him) all
during the war. Foch, like Weygand, was a devout Catholic. The two
generals prayed together at mass every morning, before beginning the
day’s slaughter.

After the war Foch lent Weygand to the Poles; he reorganized the
Polish army, vitalized it, and won the battle before the gates of Warsaw
which halted the Bolshevik invasion. The Poles, of course, never forgave
him for having saved them; he didn’t claim the credit, but they didn’t
like it when other people did. Weygand, contrary to habit, was frank ;
both the Poles and Russians were, he said, the worst armies in the
world. This was in 1922. It makes curious reading now.

Clemenceau’s opinion of Weygand is worth quoting :

"Weygand is somebody. Ugly — ^he is ugly, misshapen, tortured,
twisted; he must have had a lot of kicks when he was little. But he’s
intelligent ; he has something to him ; a dark fire. He used to anger me
at the Interallied Council. He is a man — ^how shall I say it? — dangerous,
capable of going far in a moment of crisis, of hurling himself too far.
. . . Dangerous, but precious. . . . He has one enormous quality, that
of knowing how to do his work without talking or being talked about.
He went to Poland. I don’t know what he did up there, but what he
did had to be done. He came back, didn’t saying anything. You don’t
know what he did or what he’s about. That’s pretty good. . . . Foch
wasn’t stupid. But he had good-boy genius, simplicity. Weygand is
something else, tender and profound. Of course, he’s up to his neck in
priests.”

Weygand’s Catholicism — he is a fanatic Catholic — ^naturally made him
suspect to the Left. They accused him of political ambitions, of having
turned St.-Cyr into a royalist-Catholic nest. Weygand was, before Poland
and after, a bitter Bolshevik-hater. When he was governor-general of
Syria, Herriot succeeded in ousting him ; even now, he is not a marshal
of France, although this is probably because of the technical point that
only supreme army commanders may be marshals, and he was only chief-
of-staff, Weygand is, naturally, the old white hope of the Right, and the
terrier-darling of the Fascist Leagues.

198

INSIDE EUROPE

Gamelin and Georges

General Maurice Gustave Gamelin, born in Paris in 1872 of an old
military family — ^five of his relatives were generals — is commander-in-
chief not merely of the French armies, but supreme military leader of all
the allied forces, British as well as French. Like Weygand, he is an ar-
dent Catholic, but he and Weygand, though comrades in arms for many
years, have not always been close friends. Gamelin had an exceptionally
brilliant military career. At 21, he was graduated from St -Cyr first in a
class of 500. He spent years in the War College, in Algeria, and in the
colonies; he was educated by both Foch and Joffre; he became a great
expert in cartography. When the great war came, he was one of Joffre’s
staff, and he is widely credited with having devised and pushed through
the maneuver which won the Battle of the Marne.

Gamelin hates to spend lives. This is one secret of his power. He is
frugal with blood. When war broke out again in 1939, he told his friends
that never, under his command, would there be another Somme, another
Paschendaele, when hundreds of thousands of lives were lost for ex-
tremely limited gains. In the battles of the frontiers in 1914, the French
lost three hundred thousand dead in five weeks, Gamelin said in effect,
^'Never again.^’ Thus the infinite caution of his procedure in 1939, the
excessively patient and wary tactics he pursued, and the consequent stale-
mate on the Western Front.

Gamelin is a small, tough, stubborn, friendly man, utterly without pre-
tension or vanity. He is only 5 feet 4. He married at 55. He has one
hobby (like Hitler!), water-color painting.

Gamelin will reach retirement age in 1940, when he will be 68. But the
exigencies of the present situation will probably keep him at his post. If
he retires, his successor is almost certain to be his present right-hand
man, General Alphonse Georges. This very distinguished and brilliant
officer is known as a ‘'Weygand man.”

Monsieur le President

Until 1946, unless death or revolution intervenes, the President of
France will be that amiable and harmless old gentleman, Albert Lebrun.
Like all French presidents, he is above all safe : no brilliance, no eccen-
tricity, is tolerated in the £lysee. He is supposed to have a great capacity
for tears; cartoonists usually depict him in a puddle. He is known as
**pouh-pouh,” because shortly after he entered the filysee he posed for

MORE ABOUT FRENCHMEN 199

the talkies, with wife, children, and grandchildren in considerable num-
ber. A small grandchild started to cry; the benevolent Lebrun dandled
him on his knee, forgetting the sound camera, to the tune of “Pouh-
pouh-pouh.^’ And the unfortunate syllables resounded throughout France.

Lebrun was an inconspicuous adjutant to Poincare until the murder
of Doumer lifted him to the presidency. Basically Right, he was content,
nevertheless, to rule through a laborious rotation of radical cabinets, and
then with the Front Populaire, Werth tells a nice little story of his ac-
cession in France in Ferment. He refused to commute the death sentence
of Gorgulov, the assassin of his predecessor, Doumer. Thereupon Mme.
Lebrun, a practical woman, rebuked him for his ingratitude. “After all,’’
she said, “if it hadn’t been for Gorgulov, we wouldn’t have this splendid
job.”

Chdpter XIII

Fascism and the Front Populaire

Democracy which cannot defend itself has no right to exist,

— Dr. Emil Franke

T he inner history of the Stavisky case is briefly this. He was a petty
gangster who knew important people and killed himself— or was mur-
dered by the police — ^when his little fraudulent empire collapsed. The
case rocked parliamentarism in France, which was not illogical. Of the
6io French deputies and 305 senators, not more than ten or twelve ever
knew Stavisky or had an3d:hing to do with him, and his total defalcations
amounted only to about 40,000,000 francs ; but the implications of the
affair reached the very heart of French political life.

In France there are thousands of small-time crooks who know people
who know people who know ministers. They wait in reception-rooms
and filch official letter-paper. Lawyers in France, as in America, go to
the courts and say that their clients are "‘sick,” and the cases are post-
poned. The French Gk)vemment itself may not be corrupt, but negligence,
piston (*'puU”) and political demoralization are rife in the outer corri-
dors. Stavisky was not even a good crook. But he had “pull.” This was
not corruption; it was ordinary parliamentary “manners.” When the
story broke, Chautemps had to try to cover up, which made it look
much worse than it was. How much Chautemps knew beforehand is
uncertain. And the Right opposition, the Action Frangaise, the Fascist
leagues, the Comite des Forges, the oligarchy, seized on it and exploited
it as a perfectly priceless opportunity to wreck the “Freemasons,” the
radicals, the Leftists, the government.

Serge Alexandre (Sacha) Stavisky was born in Kiev, Russia, in
1886. His family seems to have been of decent petit bourgeois Jewish
stock; his aged father, overcome with shame when Sacha’s first defalca-
tion was discovered, killed himself. . . . Stavisky’s career in the under-
world of Paris was quite typical. He was a pimp, a gigolo, a cocaine-
peddler, a petty forger, a confidence man, finally a swindler of some
proportion. Successful, he bought a theater, gambled at Deauville,

200

FASCISM AND THE FRONT POPULAIRE 201

financed a newspaper. In 1926 he was arrested for the first and only
time, on complaint of two brokers who asserted he had swindled them out
of $350,000. He was soon '‘provisionally’' released, and he never saw
the inside of a jail again; his trial was postponed by the Paris Parquet
(public prosecutor) no fewer than nineteen times. The head of the
Parquet, M. Pressard, was Chautemps’s brother-in-law. The Pans police,
who also ' knew” Stavisky, "dealt” with his case forty-five times — ^with-
out arresting him.

The years of "provisional freedom” were the great years of Sacha
Stavisky. He controlled two daily papers (both miserable rags, it is
true), the Volonte on the Left, the Rampart on the Right. One of his
lawyers, Renoult, was an ex-minister of justice. He knew countless
public officials, and corrupted dozens of minor functionaries — ^miserable
creatures on minuscule salaries, who were dazzled by Stavisky’s glory
and joined his payroll; their careers were ruined afterwards, and at
least two were suicides. He had his own bodyguard, led by the remark-
able Jo-la-Terreur. His friend Dubarry — 2. sotdisant journalist who knew
everyone in France, including Tardieu^ — ^introduced him to Chiappe, the
chief of police. Above all, a complicated fellow, he was employed as a
sort of stool-pigeon by the Surete Generale, the national police force —
distinct from the Pans prefecture — of the ministry of the interior.

In 1933 Stavisky was frustrated in two coups, despite his eminence.
So he contrived a new scheme, the flotation of fraudulent bonds issued
presumably by the municipal pawnship of Bayonne. A minister in the
Chautemps cabinet signed a letter recommending these bonds. Someone
got suspicious. About Christmas, 1933, the truth began to leak out.
Secrecy pent up in a hundred mouths for seven years burst forth in an
angry, scandalous torrent. Stavisky’s connection with the bonds became
known, and then his police record. He fled — ^liaving received a false
passport from the police. He rested in Chamonix for a fortnight, hoping
the storm would pass. Instead it blew to tornado violence. On January
8, 1934, he knew that he was ruined, and the official story is that he shot
himself. But it seems very likely that the police, to keep his mouth shut,
murdered him.

The scandal was perfectly tremendous. It hissed and boiled during

^ “Dubarry got the Surete Generale to restore Stavisky’s gambling license ; and
when an inspector of the Surete was going to arrest an illegal bookie at the races
one day, Dubarry pounced on him and said* ‘Don't you dare do that, or I’ll report
you to Andre.’ ‘Andre’ — so Inspector Colombani said telling the story to the com-
mittee of inquiry — * Andre, c*eta%t M. Tardieu*** New Statesman, April 14 , 1935*

202

INSIDE EUROPE

all of January, and came to a climax in the bloodshed of February 6.
The affair had the wildest ramifications Daladier fired Chiappe; Thome,
the chief of the secret police, was kicked upstairs to become, of all things,
director of the Comedie Frangaise; the Right shrieked that Daladier
did this to get rid of the former director, Emile Fabre, because he had
put on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which the Left had denounced as an
‘‘authoritarian” play! The Action Frangaise whooped and howled that
the Surete and the Freemasons had murdered Stavisky to save their
necks. Right deputies screamed execration on the government, for alleg-
edly having accepted contributions by Stavisky to the party funds. The
Fascist bands began to gather on the streets.

Some weeks later occurred the Prince affair. It is a shame to have
to foreshorten drastically this perfect Arsene Lupin-Gaboriau-Lecocq
case. Dr. Prince, a somewhat shady magistrate in the Parquet, was draw-
ing up a report on the Stavisky case. A phone-call, the origin of which
is to this day unknown, decoyed him to Dijon, on the pretext that his
wife’s mother was ill. The next day his body was discovered, badly
mangled, on the Paris-Dijon railway track. The official story was that
Prince had been guilty of negligence in the Stavisky business, and had
committed suicide in remorse. To accept this theory, Janet Planner
wrote, meant that “the judge sent himself a bogus message, went to
Dijon, anaesthetized himself in a strange automobile, and while uncon-
scious tied himself on a lonely railway track and allowed a train to run
over him.” So it seemed at first. Later researches proved fairly con-
clusively — ^incredible as it may seem — ^that Prince was a suicide : because
he too was spattered with Stavisky mud. The Prince affair let loose new
storms of denunciation and scandal. The Action Frangaise insisted
grimly that the Surete Generale murdered Prince to shut him up.

February Sixth

But let us turn back to the tragic events of February 6. The story of
the riots may be briefly told. A not in France is one of the most remark-
able things in the world The frenzied combatants maintain perfect dis-
cipline. Seventeen people were barbarously killed, and several thousand
injured, but there was no fighting at all between about 7:30 and 9 PM.
when everyone took time out for dinner. When it started, no one
thought of revolution; it was just a nice big riot. Communists, royalists.
Fascists, socialists, fought shoulder to shoulder under both red flag
and tricolor against the police and Garde Mobile. The fighting stopped

FASCISM AND THE FRONT POPULAIRE 203

on the stroke of twelve, because the Paris Metro (underground)
stops running at twelve-thirty, and no one wanted to walk all the way
home. Bloody, bandaged, fighters and police jostled their way into the
trains together. Promptly at seven-thirty next morning the fighting
started again.

All during January the Right gangs had been making demonstrations.
Chautemps had been forced out of office on January 27, and Daladier
succeeded him. Daladier announced that his government would be *^vite
and forf ; he genuinely feared a Fascist coup. The forces of Left and
Right were nearly at the contact point. Daladier thought that Chiappe
was deliberately encouraging the demonstrators to make trouble and
might even deliver the city to Right insurrectionaries ; certainly Chiappe’s
police, all through January, treated the demonstrators very leniently,
permitting them each time almost — ^not quite — ^to reach the chamber.

Daladier, spurred by Frot, determined to get rid of Chiappe. The cir-
cumstances were remarkable. He made the fatal error of not kicking
him straight out, but offering him, sop to his wounded pride, the gover-
norship of Morocco. Chiappe refused. Each man told a different story
of the circumstances at the parliamentary inquiry. Chiappe, dismissed,
said into the telephone — ^it was all done over the phone — “All right, I
will be on the street to-night.’’ His words, he claimed, were “(i la rue ^^ —
out on the streets, jobless, Daladier says that he said ''dans la rue/*
which means “on the street, a rioter.” So the prime minister set about
to defend himself from what he thought was impending revolution.
(The Canard Enchame, the wittiest of French papers, has an alternative
version : Chiappe really said "chez Larue/* a famous restaurant in Paris.
Cf. Werth, p. 132.) This was on February 3.

Daladier’s first appearance in the chamber as prime minister was set
for February 6. The various street groups, Camelots du Roi, Jeunesses
Patriotes, Solidarite Franqaise, the Croix de Feu, and, more pacific but
most important of all, the National Union of Ex-Service men, prepared
fierce demonstrations, against him. Daladier was in a bad position, be-
cause Chiappe had the confidence of a large part of the Paris police, who
were consequently listless. He had to call in the tough countrymen of the
Garde Mobile, a very hard-boiled body.

Daladier should never have allowed the thirty thousand demonstrators
to get into the Place de la Concorde that night. He and Frot bungled
the preliminary arrangements badly. They might have forbidden the
demonstrations, but, not trusting the police, they didn’t dare do so. It

204

INSIDE EUROPE

was unwise in the first place to use the Garde Mobile ; the decision being
taken, many more Gardes Mobiles should have been on hand, not just a
few. No one will agree as to who fired the first shots. Once shooting
began, the crowd was uncontrollable — crazy enough to storm the cham-
ber and massacre every deputy inside. So seventeen Frenchmen, includ-
ing war veterans who had fought for France, died.

The Would-be Hitler

French Fascist No. i, the chief potential French March-on-Romer,
is Lieut.-Col. Casimir de la Rocque, former President-General of the
Croix de Feu, the Voluntaires Nationaux, and the Fils de Croix de Feu.
He was born in the Auvergne in 1885, of a distinguished military fam-
ily ; his father, a count, was a general of artillery.

De la Rocque is spare, handsome, with thinning hair, a good organizer ;
not a demagogue ; a man of considerable intelligence but little warmth
or magnetism; plenty of poise and courage; no charm. His name is
against him, because the French think that "‘Casimir’" is a comical name ;
it is as if an aspirant for the American presidency were named Alphonse
— or Casimir.

De la Rocque had an interesting military career ; he left St.-Cyr with
high honors, and began active service in 1907 in Morocco, spending
nine years in North Africa as one of the brightest lads around the great
Marshal Lyautey. He learned to speak Arabic almost perfectly. One
story is that he was rebuked for wasting ammunition by firing salvos
at an imaginary enemy in the desert, hoping thus to fool his superiors
into thinking he had taken part in action. On the other hand, he was
several times wounded and decorated. He was on Foch’s staff from 1921
to 1923, when he went to Poland with Weygand. In 1925 he returned to
Morocco in the war against Abdel Krim, and became head of the cele-
brated ^'deuxibme hureau ^^ — ^military secret service. In 1928 he retired
from the army to organize the Croix de Feu.

His milieu is upper middle class, Roman Catholic, illiberal. His brother,
Count Pierre de la Rocque, is aide-de-camp to the Comte de Paris, who
is heir to the Due de Guise, the pretender to the French throne. But
Pierre and Casimir are not on cordial terms ; Casimir, who pretends that
he is “non-political” and who dissociates himself with most political
groups, doesn’t want overt royalist support.

He talks often of his “mystique,” which is a combination of patriotic
fervor, military virtues, and churchly faith. Though he has a very con-

FASCISM AND THE FRONT POPULAIRE 205

siderable force behind him, he denies ambitions to be dictator; he says
he wants ‘‘order’’ in France, nothing more. He has never run a candidate
in an election, but his followers perpetually threaten a coup d'etat. He
will, he says, support any “useful” government, attack any “dangerous”
government. But he cannot be pinned down to defining exactly what he
considers dangerous or useful. “He is not Christ, he is merely John the
Baptist,” one of his followers said — ^not explaining exactly what he
meant — or who Christ was to be. His social program is a sort of upper-
class, Lady Bountiful charity-paternalism; his organization runs soup
kitchens in poor neighborhoods, builds kindergartens and sanitaria.

De la Rocque seems a rather pallid Fascist; people, however, fear
him. He founded a private army like Hitler, but on a more restricted
scale ; at first, membership was confined to front-line veterans who had
won decorations under fire. Its aim was — ^vaguely — ^“to restore the
‘mystique’ of sacrifice for the fatherland, consecrate itself to duty to
France.” His followers in the beginning were strongly Leftist, and part
of the unofficial program was to wipe out the regents of the Banque de
France ; but de la Rocque himself is allied to big industry. FranQois de
Wendel is said to hold card of membership No. 13 in the group. And
de Wendel — Thyssen to de la Rocque’s Hitler! — “rounded out” his
membership, so it is said, with funds. Another of de la Rocque’s sup^
porters is supposed to be Ernest Mercier, the biggest electrical magnate
in France, and another is Mumm, the champagne manufacturer.

Like Hitler, de la Rocque has tended to shed his early socialist sup-
porters. These wanted what they called “socialism for the middle classes,”
an obvious imitation of the Nazi program. De la Rocque’s leading sup-
porter, Bertrand de Maud’huy, son of a general who commanded the
Blue Devils in the war, left him because he wanted more socialism in
the movement, just as Otto Strasser left Hitler.

De la Rocque not only has disappointed his Left followers ; those on
the Right think that he is too slow, too cautious. In April, 1935, two or
three of his men invaded and sacked the headquarters of the socialist
federation on the Rue Feydeau in Paris, searching for arms ; they found
none. De la Rocque, embarrassed, quibbled and hesitated, and finally ex-
communicated the bold burglars. Later came the Rightist conspiracy of
the “Cagoulards” (hooded men), which was promptly suppressed.

Three times he has had a chance to seize power ; each time he missed
it. On February 6 his cohorts could easily have captured the chamber.
But he held his men back. “France wasn’t ready,” he explained. Perhaps,

2o6

INSIDE EUROPE

like Hitler, he hopes to gain power by legal means. Like Hitler in 1932,
he reached the stage of one consultation with the head of government —
after the resignation of Doumergue — but he was not asked to form a
cabinet.

At its height the Croix de Feu comprised, so its leaders claimed, a
membership of over half a million. All were ex-service men or sons of
ex-service men. The discipline was strict, and the methods of organiza-
tion secret. De la Rocque insisted on fairly complete application of the
Leader Principle, much as this would seem to affront French indi-
vidualist character. The organization commanded not only men and
money, but automobiles and lorries for transport, and some sixty air-
planes. “Croix de Feu” does not, incidentally, mean Fiery Cross in the
Ku Klux Klan sense of Fiery Cross ; “Croix” signifies decoration for
war service, and “Feu” means the fire of the front-line trenches

All of which made it the more remarkable that, when the Blum
cabinet dissolved the Croix de Feu and the other Leagues, Colonel de la
Rocque submitted like a lamb. He tried to organize his followers into a
legal political group, the P.S.F. {Parti Social Frangais), but it was a
failure. He was severely discredited in 1937 after the Clichy riots, and
when it was disclosed that for some time he, this pure and mystical
character, had been secretly subsidized by Andre Tardieu.

Other Flowers of Fascism

The Croix de Feu, the most “respectable” of the lot, overshadowed
the other street groups, because the French, a respectable people, like
their Fascism to be as mannerly as possible. (Incidentally, none of these
organizations will admit to bemg “Fascist.”) The only group which is
openly pro-Hitler— commonly it is said to be subsidized by the Germans
— ^is that of the “Francistes” ; they are of absolutely no importance.

The Jeunesses Patriotes, considerably backed by heavy industry, are
led by a deputy, Pierre Taittinger. They are nationalist, anti-communist,
and on the extreme Right. The organization claims two hundred and
forty thousand men, and among the leaders are some personages of con-
sequence, like Deputy Ybamegary. Marshal Lyautey was an honorary
member of this group ; General Weygand is said to be.

The Solidarite Franqaise was founded by Coty, the Corsican perfume
manufacturer. It is more to the Right than the Croix de Feu, not so
Right as the Jeunesses Patriotes. Coty was never a member of the finan-
cial oligarchy, and thus the Solidarite affects to despise the Banque and

FASCISM AND THE FRONT POPULAIRE 207

the oligarchy. It is supposed to number one hundred and eighty thou-
sand men.

The Union Nationale des Combattants, with nine hundred thousand
adherents, is less inclined to street violence than the others; it is the
Right offshoot of the far bigger and more important organization, the
Federation des Anciens Combattants, with four million members, which
is the Left veterans' association. All these Rightist groups were sup-
pressed in 1936 by the Blum government, one of the most worthwhile
things Blum did.

The royalists — ^were there enough space — should have a section to
themselves. Their newspaper is, of course, the Action Frangaise; their
street gangs are the Camelots du Roi, organized in slugger squads,
equipped with knuckle-dusters. The leaders are the sculptor Real del
Sarte, the organizer Maurice Pujo, and the pamphleteers Charles Maur-
ras and Leon Daudet. The royalists — ^supported largely by wealthy
dowagers in the “Association of Royalist Ladies" — ^are less important
than the fantastic noise they make. The Action Frangaise makes France
a marvelously amusing country, journalistically; but its influence does
not go much beyond that. The royal family itself has repudiated it.

Chiappe

The most dangerous man in France is probably not Weygand nor
de la Rocque, but little white-gloved Jean Chiappe, the ex-chief of
police, known everywhere in Paris by the diminutive Jean Fesse —
Johnny Ass.

Chiappe (pronounced Kee-ahp) is, like Napoleon, Coty, and the bandit
Spada, a Corsican. He got his start, strangely, through a radical cabinet ;
now he is on the extreme Right. His step-son-in-law, Horace de Car-
buccia, another Corsican, is owner of a newspaper, Gringoire, violently
reactionary. One of Chiappe's friends is Zographos, the manager of
the Greek syndicate which specializes in gambling at Deauville, Biarritz,
and Monte Carlo. Chiappe was very popular with his own police during
his term of office.

Bald, swarthy, squat, athletic— he is a notable duelist— Chiappe is a
remarkably melodramatic character. A creature of cabals and vendettas,
he seems to represent the life of the Maquis (Corsican bush) in Paris.
He looks like a vaudeville villain; a confidence man; a jolly but under-
sized professor of medicine ; an animal trainer ; a hirsute attendant at a
Turkish bath.

2d8

INSIDE EUROPE

Chiappe's come-back in politics after his temporary eclipse February
6 was startling at first. He was elected to the post of municipal councilor
—alderman— m the Paris district of St.-Germain des Pres, part of the
fashionable Faubourg St.-Germain. Then he became president of the con-
setl municipal of Paris — ^mayor. If some day he should get a ministerial
post in a Right cabinet, fur — ^the fur of MM. Daladier, Frot and all the
socialists and communists — ^will fly. For the white-gloved Corsican is a
notorious Red-hunter.

Chiappe had to admit to having ^'met'’ Stavisky, the indirect but
effective author of his downfall. But that he had anything to ''do*' with
him he denies with high Corsican howls and curses.

The Neo-Socialists

These are they who rebelled against Blum too early. Adrien Marquet,
the Mayor of Bordeaux and a dentist by profession, seceded from the
orthodox Second Internationale socialist party in 1933 to form a sub-
group of his own, the Neo-Socialists. A bold and engagingly cynical
politician, with a local machine which rivaled that of Herriot in Lyons,
he carried about fifty deputies with him. Marquet is comparatively young,
forceful, and a great ladies' man, and what the French called debromllard.
One story is that an old-time socialist, visiting him in the mayoralty in
Bordeaux, incessantly called him ‘‘Comrade." “Stop that ‘Comrade,' "
Marquet said, “Outside the office Pm ‘Comrade.’ In here I’m the Mayor !’’

Marquet broke with Blum because he was convinced that orthodox
socialism no longer met the urgent needs of post-war Europe. “Order,
Authority, Nation" were his watchwords. He professed himself an
admirer of some qualities of Nazi Germany and said that the world —
and France — ^needed renovation, revivification, and “benevolent authori-
tarianism." Then he made the mistake of joining the Doumergue “Na-
tional" government. His colleagues thought this represented a shift in
principles — ^and threw him out of his own new-born party.

His successor as leader of the Neo-Socialists was Marcel Deat, an
Auvergnat like Laval. He took a strong defeatist line in the Munich
crisis, and led the “Don’t Die for Danzig" movement.

Turncoat Doriot

The dissident communist, Jacques Doriot, is an interesting character
in French politics, because he personifies what remains of Trotskyism.
His new Popular" party, formed in the spring of 1936, with its news-

FASCISM AND THE FRONT POPULAIRE 209

paper Emancipation Nationale, seemed at outs^^t merely one of those
maddening ‘^splinter’’ groups that obstruct effective cooperation by the
Left ; but Doriot has some significance as an anti-Stalm communist, op-
posing the trend of modern Soviet policy. Doriot, who wants his revolu-
tion right away, says that Stalin, a Russian “imperialist,” has sacrificed
the needs of France to those of Russia and has betrayed the “true” com-
munists. He is not the only one to say so.

Doriot has a brilliant revolutionary career behind him. An orthodox
communist for many years, he spent much time in Russia. Twice he went
to jail, once for agitation in French Indo-China. For a time he shared
the regular communist leadership with Thorez. He has been a deputy
for many years, and until recently was mayor of the Parisian suburb
Saint-Denis.

Farmer Fascist

Henri Dorgeres, whose real name is Henri d^Halluin, who at one time
promised to be a remarkable phenomenon in French politics, is a peas-
ant leader who organized a militant agrarian movement, a modern
Jacquerie, which briefly swept the countryside as the “Front Paysan.”
He is not in the chamber, though he missed succeeding to Chautemps’s
seat by only a few hundred votes. Dorgeres, one of the best natural
orators in France, is, according to his enemies, a fraud ; he is no true son
of the soil, no peasant, but an aristocrat in disguise, the Vicomte
d’Halluin. These stories are untrue. His name is Halluin, but he is no
fraud. His father was a cattle merchant in Lille. His policy is drastically
counter-revolutionary: clean up the chamber of deputies by “shooting
the whole damned lot,” “liberate” the farmers, build a peasant-corporative
state.

Janet Flanner has described him thus : “An odd-looking butcher's boy
with a small, beautiful, aristocratic face ; neat, intense manual gestures ;
and a sensitive, sensible eloquence that recently brought eight thousand
wheat- and sugar-beet-farmers through miles of mud to hear him speak
in the town's Grain Hall.”

Origins of the Popular Front

The Front Populaire really began back in July, 1934, when after much
psychological preparation and a year of negotiation, the national coun-
cil of the French socialist party approved, by a vote of 3,471 to 366, the
proposal of the communists for a program of common action against

210

INSIDE EUROPE

war and Fascism. The draft agreement had been hammered out by a
joint committee of ten socialists and ten communists. Thus the way to
the Popular Front was open. It was made possible by three things (i)
fear of Hitler, (2) fear of Fascism in France, (3) the new policy of
the Communist Internationale in Moscow which decided to play down
the idea of world revolution, and permit the French communist party
to go to the polls on a patriotic, non-revolutionary basis.

At first it seemed odd that socialists, to save democracy, should unite
with communists, who heretofore had been enemies of democracy. But
the events of February stimulated desire for fusion. Then Laval visited
Stalin in 1935. Stalin announced that the comrades in France should call
off the revolution, unite with other enemies of Fascism, and support the
French government and even the French army so long as was necessary,
in opposition to Fascist forces. Thus, temporarily — only too temporarily !
— ^the communists became "respectable.^^ The years of Popular Frontism
and Collective Security began. In 1939, of course, after the Russo-
German pact. Popular Fronts everywhere collapsed.

In the early days of negotiation in France the communist leader,
Marcel Thorez, announced that he did not regard the Front Populaire
as an instrument of socialization, much less of communism. He added
his hope for the eventual arrival of a communist system in France, but
he said that it must take an essentially French form — ^not something dic-
tated from abroad. Thorez’s motive was quite logical. No sensible com-
munist wanted to weaken France with threats of civil war, when it
seemed that a strong France was Russia's best ally against Hitler.

The socialists accepted the communist initiative. The two parties,
which had fought each other bitterly, each claiming the exclusive right
of representing the proletariat, began to work together. Later, as we
know, Daladier and the radicals came in. The communists, however,
never entered the French government. They took much the same posi-
tion that Blum’s socialists took in relation to previous administrations —
that of a Left group supporting the government so long as it behaved.
But there was a difference in that the communists were definitely com-
mitted to Blum's program — ^their joint program — ^whereas Blum had
never been committed to the programs of radical governments that pre-
ceded him. In the early days Blum said, "I can do what I want to do,
unless my friends on the Left push me too hard."

A subsidiary father of the Popular Front was a remarkable young
political idealist, Gaston Bergery, who began his career as a radical,

FASCISM AND THE FRONT POPULAIRE 211

turned independent, and finally gave up a comfortable seat in the Cham-
ber in protest at the formation and conduct of Doumergue's national
government. He was the only deputy to do so. He fought a gallant by-
election at his constituency, Mantes, and was beaten after a tremendous
fight by only a few hundred out of sixteen thousand odd votes.

Bergery is an acute and sophisticated young man, married to an
American girl, Bettma Shaw Jones, an assistant at Schiaparelli's. She is
tall, stylish, moody. She fought the election at his side, complete with
dashing white toque — ^and pet marmoset ! Mantes is an industrial, pro-
letarian constituency, and opinion is divided whether the '‘wheat trust,"
the instrument of Bergery’s Right opponents, beat him — or his wife's
monkey.

Bergery founded an early group of his own, called at first the Front
Commun, then the Front Social, finally the Front Populaire. It embodied
the same aims as the United Front — coalescence of all Left forces in
a fight to the last trench against Fascism and the military leagues. This
young man, not in the least doctrinaire, an exciting combination of ideal-
ist and practical politician, had the idea ; the others worked it out. Then
the name Front Populaire was taken over to describe the entire move-
ment.

As a result, Bergery came to be called the “Lenin of France," the
“Nero of the French Republic" and a “Marat and Robespierre" in one.
Actually, he is neither a communist nor even a socialist. His movement,
he says, is merely “anti-capitalist." He wants a merger of all the farmers,
peasants, workmen, white-collar bourgeoisie, middlemen, who form
ninety-five per cent of the population of France, against the five per cent
of capitalists who exploit them. A cultivated aristocrat, he is no prole-
tarian. He believes the role of the proletariat to be much exaggerated
in the mechanics of socialism. And in France, he points out, only seven
million out of forty-two million people are workers in the Marxist sense
of the term.

Two personages on whom a great deal in the Front Populaire depended
were Leon Jouhaux and Marcel Thorez. The veteran Jouhaux, born in
1879, is the leader of the C.G.T. (Confederation Generale du Travail,
the Socialist Union) and the boss of French trade-unionism. His father
took part in the commune ; his grandfather fought in the revolution of
1848. Jouhaux went to work in a match factory at sixteen ; since 1909 he
has been the C.G.T.'s somewhat old fashioned and benevolent dictator.
Blum appointed him a Regent of the Banque; which is as if John L.

312

INSIDE EUROPE

Lewis should become a Morgan partner. . . . Marcel Thorez, the com-
munist leader, much younger and stronger meat, born in 1896, was a
farm laborer as a boy, then a coal miner. Militant, persuasive, he worked
himself up the secretary-generalship of the communist party in 1932. In
1939 arrested when, on the outbreak of war and after the Russo-

German pact, the communist party was dissolved.

The Front Populaire, we have seen, collapsed for various reasons.
The great thing to its credit was that it effectively abolished the threat
of Fascism in France; it showed that French democracy was capable
of protecting itself, and that Fascism can come to France only at the cost
of civil war.

a I SATURDAY, July i8, 1936, civil war broke out in Spain. A
clique of predatory and “nationalist”-minded military chieftains
rose against the legally and democratically elected government of Spain,
and turned the peninsula into a shambles. What began as a military
coup d'etat developed into a conflict of ideologies. The Germans and
Italians helped the Spanish Fascists ; the Russians — Plater and much less
intensively — Whelped the democratic loyalists. The war cost almost a
million lives. Bloodshed of such savagery had scarcely been seen in
modern times. Following German and Italian intervention, possibility
that the struggle might become a veritable World War became acute.
For a time ^'pirate’' submarines were openly torpedoing neutral merchant-
men in the Mediterranean. For month after haggard month, Europe
watched the Spanish caldron.

The cleavages, both horizontal and vertical, represented by the Spanish
conflict were enormous. Poor against rich ; workers against troops ; the
laity against the upper hierarchy of the church ; volunteers against mer-
cenaries; the peasantry against the aristocrats; the landless against the
feudal landlords; democracy against Fascism; all these confrontations
played their part in Spain. And these confrontations are not peculiar
to Spaniards. It is not difficult to see why the struggle in Spain found
developing repercussions all over the world. Emotionally the struggle
became a world struggle. And it was waged with fierce partisanship,
because it was represented as cutting across two of the most precious
shibboleths of the average man, his feelings about class, and his feelings
about religion.

Let us first underline a few primary and incontrovertible facts that
have been obscured or misrepresented by propaganda. It is grossly and

2T3

INSIDE EUROPE

214

wantonly untruthful to speak of a '‘Red"' revolt in Spain. There never
v^as any ‘‘Red’’ revolt. This is simple fact. The revolt was made by
General Franco and his friends. There were no communists — not even
any socialists — in the republican government which he sought to over-
throw, though they supported it. The socialists and commimists came in
later, but when Franco moved on July 18 the Spanish government was
devoid of them. It was certainly a Left government — ^ moderate and
not very efficient Left — ^but there were no Marxists in it.

Another point is the chronology of foreign intervention. It is now
established beyond any doubt that German and Italian intervention
occurred months before Russian help reached Spain. Indeed German and
Italian airplanes were active at the very outset, months before the Inter-
national Brigade was organized by foreign volunteers to aid the loy-
alists. And Russia at no time sent troops to Spain, as did Italy,

The forces on both sides can be summarized in a paragraph or two.
On the rebel or insurgent side (called the “Nationalists” in pro-Franco
newspapers) were, speaking broadly, the officer class, the feudal aristoc-
racy, the bulk of the politically minded Roman Catholics, the monarchists,
the Carlists from Navarre, the Falangistas or Fascists, the army officers,
some of the industrialists, and part of the national police force or Civil
Guard. Their rank-and-file fighting force contained Germans, Italians,
Moorish troops from Spanish Morocco and the Riff, and the Spanish
Foreign Legion — in a word, comparatively few authentic Spaniards ex-
cept the Carlists and Falangistas.

On the government side was — ^the government. It came to include as
time went on all the forces of the Left — ^republicans, liberals, democrats,
socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists. It included also the Cata-
lans centering on Barcelona, and such Roman Catholics as the Basque
autonomists. The Basque clergy was solidly pro-government. It included
the bulk of the peasants, the bulk of the landless, and all but a small
fraction of the workers. It included most of the freemasons, most of the
middle class, most of the intelligentsia. Its army, since ninety-five per
cent of the officers struck with Franco, was at first an extremely make-
shift affair; the hardest kind of fighting and help from foreign volun-
teers turned it into a first-class fighting force. A militia of the people
became a people’s army, with an extraordinary discipline exerted not by
officers but from below.

The essence of the Spanish struggle can be compressed into a single
sentence. The people of Spain, the conmon people, groping toward

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 215

progress after centuries of feudalism, fought desperately to overcome a
reactionary revolt. The struggle was foursquare between the Left and
Right — and the Right was in the wrong. The people of Spain, after five
years of a weak republic, rose to defend it — ^because, for good or ill, it
was theirs.

Good-by Monarchy

Under the monarchy Spain was almost as backward a country as
Czarist Russia. The illiteracy rate was the highest in Europe (Portugal
excepted), namely forty-five per cent. The national history had been a
study in disintegration for three hundred years. The country, potentially
rich, was stagnating with corruption and decay. The landless workers
were little better than serfs, and some of them lived almost like animals.
And the ruling classes — ^to quote Life — ' Vere probably the world’s worst
bosses — ^irresponsible, arrogant, vain, ignorant, shiftless, and incom-
petent.’^

The monarchy, represented in the twentieth century by Alfonso XIII,
was supported by three pillars, the landed aristocracy, the army, and
the church.

Concerning the land — ^the central problem of Spain — ^a few figures are
relevant. One per cent of the population owned no less than fifty-one per
cent of the land. In all Spain, not more than fifteen to twenty thousand
people owned as much as two hundred fifty hectares of land. The vast
majority of the people on the land — and Spain is seventy-two per cent
agricultural — ^were landless or owned nothing more than tiny strips.
Forty per cent had no land at all. By contrast, one grandee, the Duke
of Alba, held a territory almost as big as Belgium; on it were fifty-five
villages. The landowners seldom put money back in the land; much
fertile ground was turned over to grazing ; only one crop was harvested
each year ; in some parts of Spain irrigation was unknown and modem
machinery forbidden. Many of the landowners were absentees.

Spain had the most top-heavy army in the world. There were 365 actwe
generals (700 in all) — one for every day in the year — ^and 21,000
officers, a proportion of one officer to every six enlisted men. Not even
the German army in 1914 had 21,000 officers. The army, which had done
little to distinguish itself since about 1640, consumed at least a quarter
of the national budget. The military had feudal privileges. The Civil
Guard was sacrosanct, and until 1931 civilians could be tried by military
courts.

216

INSIDE EUROPE

The church held an overwhelmingly dominant position in Spanish life.
There were 40,000 priests and clergy, a fantastic number, all paid by
the state, all part of the state, almost all associated in spirit and politics
with the feudal landowners and the army. The church and the Jesuit
order, through ownership of mines, industries, shipping, public utilities,
banks, transportation, orange groves, expressed itself in business and
industry as well as politics and religion. The church dominated educa-
tion, through the state of which it was a part, and yet Spain was forty-
five per cent illiterate. The church was rich and decadent ; all the abuses
of clericalism piled up. The church hierarchy and the religious orders
exercised almost unbelievable powers. Blasphemy for instance was a
crime. The Inquisition was not formally abolished until 1931.

The monarchy fell in 1931 of its own weight. There was no revolution.
Only an election. Not a drop of blood was shed nor a shot fired. Alfonso
paid the penalty of years of misrule by driving to Cartagena from Madrid
in perfect safety. No one molested him, and no one in the aristocracy,
the army, or the church lifted a forefinger in his behalf. The dynasty
which had ruled Spam for five centuries disappeared into the dust of
history like a plum dropping from a tree. But — ^the forces behind Alfonso
were still there.

Republic and Reaction

The quality of the republican government formed in April, 1931, gave
hope to liberals the world over. It was composed of middle-class intel-
lectuals mostly — ^professors, avil servants, literary men. The spiritual
fathers of the republic were not politicians or army generals, but phy-
sicians like Dr. Gregario Maranon, a specialist in ductless glands, in
whose home the revolutionary committee met, and philosophers like
Miguel de Unamuno and Jose Ortega y Gasset, whose Revolt of the
Masses expressed the ideals behind the movement. Among members of
the government were litterateurs like Manuel Azana, who soon became
prime minister, professors like Fernando de los Rios, and labor leaders
like Largo Caballero, who had been a mason by trade.

You can judge a country pretty well by its ambassadors. Suppose the
British government should give its best embassies to H. G. Wells,
Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell. Well, look at the Spaniards. To
Geneva went Salvador de Madariaga, a professor and journalist. To
London went the distinguished novelist Ramon Perez de Ayala. The
Germans got a Left-wing socialist intellectual, Luis Araquistain; Julio

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 217

Alvarez del Vayo, formerly the Manchester Guardian correspondent in
Madrid, went to Mexico ; Rome got a poet and Chile got the translator
of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History.

The first thing the republican government did was write a constitu-
tion. It was a remarkable document. It exuded the pure cool aroma of
Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson — ^and alas of Weimar.
It disestablished religion and — tremendous item — separated church and
state ; it declared Spain ‘‘a worker’s republic of all classes” ; it abolished
illegitimacy, made free primary education compulsory, and — ^in Spain ! —
gave women the vote. It made divorce easy. It promised labor participa-
tion in the rewards of industry. It was the first constitution of any na-
tional state to concede authority to the League of Nations; Spain was,
for instance, forbidden to declare war except under conditions authorized
by the League covenant. Ironic that seems now !

What happened was that the constitution did not, of course, work.
The youthful republic paid far too much attention to theory and wasted
far too much energy in determining its aspirations — on paper — ^without
attempting to put the aspirations into concrete effect. It concerned itself
with fine phrases and neglected concrete policy. Its leaders, like Manuel
Azana, were such profound liberals that they believed in free speech even
for those who would destroy free speech. Azana and his men thought
that they could profoundly change the organization of society without a
revolution. They were wrong.

The republican leaders knew well enough who their enemies were,
and they did set about moving against them — ^but not drastically enough.
They went just far enough to provoke a fury of reaction. They were
unskilled politicians, and in the new Cortes (parliament) they were
presently sabotaged and outmaneuvered. Their job should have been to
destroy feudal Spain. They might have been merciless to their enemies,
as they knew their enemies would be merciless to them. They might
have learned the lesson of Russia, that no revolution can succeed until
the privileges of the propertied classes are not curtailed, but extirpated.
Instead they dabbled, they temporized, they made half-hearted and in-
efficient reforms.

As to the nobility — ^the republic sought to emasculate it by taking its
pretty titles away. The Duke of Alba, from twenty-six lines of fine type
in the old official gazette, was reduced to plain Senor ; but the Duke of
Alba himself was not eliminated. A land reform scheme was worked
out — ^in theory — ^but very little land actually got to the peasants. In 1932

2i8

INSIDE EUROPE

General Sanjurjo revolted against the new republic in the best Spanish
manner ; the revolt was quickly put down and as punishment all the land
of all the grandees of Spain was confiscated — ^but only on paper.

As to the church, Azana attacked it without destroying it; he deprived
it of just enough privilege to make it stronger through anger. His
Religious Orders bill of June, 1933, ‘^nationalized’^ church property,
valued at $500,000,000, but left it in the hands of the church; he the-
oretically dissolved the Jesuit order but the Jesuits were not expelled;
he forbade the Jesuits to teach but the ban did not become effective.
Within two years, like a black, solid, powerful mushroom, the church
protruded itself again into power and prominence. Even during the re-
public, it had more influence in Spain than in any country in Europe,
Austria perhaps excepted.

As to the army, the republic thought it could solve the perennial
problem of military treason by the simple expedient of pensioning off
some ten thousand officers — at full pay for life.

On the other side were great and positive achievements of the new
government First, Azana and his men gave Spain some political sense,
they pulled Spain forward to contact with the modern world, they gave
it hope. Second, they embarked on a tremendous educational program;
the education minister, Fernando de los Rios, spread schools — ^ten thou-
sand of them — ^through the land with mighty fingers. Third, they abol-
ished many of the minor survivals of feudalism. Fourth, they solved
the Catalan problem, which had been a bugaboo to Spanish politics for
four hundred years, by giving the Catalans provincial autonomy. They
promised the Basques autonomy, too.

In the autumn of 1933 Azana was forced out of office. Thus the first
period of the Left republic lasted two and one-half years. A coalition of
Rightist parties — ^loyal to the republic if it should be theirs — ^assumed
power. The Rightists made what was tantamount to a counter-revolu-
tion. In October, 1934, the socialists revolted against this counter-revo-
lution, and were put down by force and with ghastly bloodshed. The
Rightists (still loyal to the republic in theory) crushed the miners and
workers in Asturias with Moorish troops. The Moors in Spain again !
Some fourteen hundred men were killed, all but a few of them civilians.
The Rightists wiped Asturias bloody. And terror spread all over Spain.
By the end of 1935, some thirty thousand socialists and republicans
were in jail.

The Rightists stayed in power, through a series of shambling govern-

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 219

ments, from the autumn of 1933 to the spring of 1936. It seemed that
the Rousseau- Jefferson revolution was ended. But the brief flicker of
daylight from 1931 to 1933 still lit the minds of the people. Following
a series of violent scandals, and forced into holding an election, the
Right went to the polls in February, 1936. The parties of the republic
banded together in a Popular Front and won a narrow victory. The
Popular Front, plus the Basques, polled 4,838,449 votes ; the Right got
3,996,931. A Popular Front government was formed — ^not, however, in-
cluding socialists or communists — ^and set out to revive the 1931 re-
public.

It did not have much time to do so. On July 18, 1936, Reaction rose
in the person of General Franco. The Left — elected to office in an in-
contestably free and legal manner — resisted. So civil war — ^real civil war
of the kind that Europe had not seen since Russia in 1919 — came to
Spain.

People

A word at this juncture on personalities. Don Manuel Azana became
prime minister again after the February election — ^the second chance he
had at the same big job — ^but soon he was elevated to the less active
position of the presidency of the republic. Azana was born January 10,
1880, at Alcala de Henares, the birthplace of Cervantes. He is a student,
a philosopher, and had he never been prime minister and president of
Spain he would be well known wherever Spanish is read by intellectuals.
He has written essays, plays, novels, and at least one of his works is a
minor classic, 'The Garden of the Monks.’"

Azana spent many years as a civil servant. But always he had politics
in mind, and he made a special hobby of army organization and military
affairs. Once a friend asked him, "Why do you pore over these dull
army books ?” "Because,” Azana answered, "in twenty years I am going
to be minister of war.” He was. This would seem to show passionate
forward-looking interest to his career. But when Louis Fischer inter-
viewed him in 1936 and said he hoped he would still be in office the next
year, Azana replied, "Of course — ^unless I get bored with politics.”

He is unequivocal about his politico-philosophical stand. When I inter-
viewed him in 1932 and asked him where he belonged he replied almost
defiantly, "I am an intellectual, a democrat, and a bourgeois.”

Like no fewer than six other members of the first republican govern-
ment, Azana was a freemason. This contributed somewhat to his collapse

220

INSIDE EUROPE

in 1933. Masonry, as in France, has played a powerful role in Spanish
politics, though one dislikes to simplify the issue too much, to talk too
glibly of the dividing line between Masonry and Catholicism as a major
factor in the revolution. Indeed the line is illogically awry. Lerroux,
the Freemason, and Gil Robles, the Jesuit, are — or were — ^ardent allies.

The two most interesting figures in the Rightist camp before the civil
war were Don Alejandro Lerroux and Don Jose Maria Gil Robles.
Lerroux, comparatively little known outside Spain, one of the most
bizarre personages in modern Europe, had a long career as an agitator
and a revolutionary, became rich and powerful, took office in the first
republican government, and quickly then shifted to the Right. His whole
career was a series of shifts, Marcelino Domingo, one of the founders of
the radical-socialist party and an early comrade, formally charged him
with betraying the other republican leaders in an uprising in 1917.
Miguel de Unamuno, the great Basque philosopher, sardonically sug*
gested that Lerroux claimed to be a republican so that everyone else
would stop being a republican.

One of his friends was Juan March, the tobacco millionaire who
helped finance Franco's revolt. Years before, during the Great War,
Lerroux and March did a thriving business supplying war materials to
German submarines off the Iberian coast. On a trip to Paris, Lerroux
gave an interview to Le Journal nobly stating his and Spanish aims.
‘When copies of Le Journal reached Madrid," wrote one of Lerroux’s
former friends, “people vomited in the Puerto del Sol." And another of
his early friends said of Lerroux, “In this man's paunch are established
the seven deadly sins." The story went in the early days of the republic
that a citizen filing an application wrote after “Antecedents," “Neither
criminal nor LerrouxistaJ^

More dangerous than Lerroux, however, younger and more vigorous —
he was born in 1901 — ^was Jose Maria Gil Robles. He was the son of a
university professor; he studied with the Jesuits and his scholastic
record was exceptional; he went into teaching first, then journalism, then
politics. He organized the C.E.D.A. (Federation of Autonomous Parties
of the Right), forced the Lerroux government to take him into the cabi-
net, and openly proclaimed hostility to the republic he was serving.
“The republic is like a case of measles ; we will live through it," he said.
A militant Catholic and reactionary, Gil Robles has an unusual trait for
a Spaniard— energy. A formidable enough speaker, he lacks what the
Spaniards call elevacion; he has vehemence rather than emotion, anger

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 221

rather than indignation. Gil Robles is clever, ambitious, sibylline. He
fled to Portugal when the civil war broke out. Franco had no use for
him.

The Outbreak and the Course of the War

From February, 1936, when it was elected to power, until July, the
Popular Front government maintained uneasy rule. But the country was
throbbing with disorder. All the years of pent-up hate were rushing to
explosive outlet. The people, as Lije put it, had fired the bosses; the
bosses refused to stay fired ; violence was inevitable. There were several
hundred political assassinations in six months. The Fascists deliberately
provoked disorders as an excuse to invoke order later. The Left retaliated.
A Leftist officer. Lieutenant Castillo of the Assault Police, was murdered
by Rightist gunmen. Then Senor Calvo Sotelo, who had been finance
minister under Primo de Rivera and who hoped to be leader of the
United Right, was killed by comrades of Castillo.

The detailed course of the war can be sketched only briefly here. Fol-
lowing a careful plan — ^but speeded up because of the assassination of
Calvo Sotelo — ^the garrisons in most of Spain rose on July 18. The
revolts were successful in some towns, like Salamanca, Seville, Toledo;
but in the more important cities — Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga,
Bilbao — they either misfired or were crushed by the enraged people,
who (in Madrid for instance) stormed the barracks almost literally with
their bare hands The coup d'etat, as a coup d'etat, was a failure. It
aimed to seize power in all Spain overnight. It did not. No one antici-
pated the capacity of the government and the people to resist.

But General Francisco Franco, the governor of the Canary Islands,
flew to Morocco and with the aid of German and Italian airplanes suc-
ceeded in breaking the blockade at Gibraltar and flying Foreign Legion
and Moorish troops to the mainland, whence they were dispatched to
Seville and the front,^ Moorish troops began to flood Spain. So Spain,
which had so often invaded Morocco, was being invaded by Moroccans.
The use of these Moors, excellent soldiers, in later campaigns— for in-
stance against the Roman Catholics of the Basque country— by a junta
steeped in political Catholicism, and with the aid of a government, that
of Germany, at the moment engaged in a fierce religious struggle with

^ Also his planes drove off the loyalist fleet and he was soon able to get material
across.

222 INSIDE EUROPE

the Vatican, provides one of the most interesting of modern historical
ironies.

Of the fact of Italian intervention at this early stage there can be
doubt no longer. As early as July 31 twenty Italian airplanes flew to
Spanish Morocco to assist others already there; two came down in
French territory. The French government found them to be Italian air
force bombers, with their marks painted over. The pilots carried military
papers. Other Italian planes, it is believed, reached Morocco before the
war began. German planes were active as early as mid- August and soon
German '‘technicians"' began to pour into the country.

The war started out as a series of disjointed offensives which became
stalemates. The rebels held the coast around Gibraltar, Seville, and
much territory in the north; the government held the central plain of
Castille and most of the southern coast, as well as all of Catalonia. In
August the rebels took Irun and San Sebastian and began to form their
lines around Madrid. Then came the astonishing adventure of Toledo,
where rebels had been trapped in the Alcazar since the war began.
Franco’s stubbornly advancing troops raised the seventy-day siege on
September 28. The government, trying to blast the rebels out, seemed
pitifully incompetent. The Moors, entering Toledo, found 600 govern-
ment wounded in the hospital and assassinated them by hand-grenades.
Previously, at Badajoz on the Portuguese border, 4,000 loyalist civilians
and militiamen were captured by Franco's men and machine-gunned in
the bull-ring.

Nothing, it appeared, could keep Franco from winning at this time.
His lines drew closer to Madrid and early in October its siege
began. But the loyalists miraculously stiffened. Franco's army reached
the suburbs of the capital on November 7 and the government fled to
Valencia. Apparently during one twenty-four-hour interval Franco could
have taken Madrid by walking in. But he waited. What really saved
Madrid was the capture of Toledo; if Franco had not made that long
detour Madrid might have fallen in September. After mid-November
Madrid was safe, in a manner of speaking, though the enemy was still
entrenched in the outskirts of the town The siege lasted many months.
Madrid was attacked incessantly from the air and by artillery fire, and
in five different infantry offensives ; they all collapsed. One-third of the
city was destroyed by bombs and shell-fire ; the life of the capital was
dislocated and transformed ; thousands of civilians, women and children,
were killed.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 223

At this point the story of the \^ar becomes inextricably involved with
the major fact of intervention. As early as mid-August a German war-
ship appeared off Ceuta, and soon German destroyers and submarines
dotted Spanish waters. German and Italian airplanes began to take active
part in the land warfare, with German and Italian pilots. A Junker
bomber was captured by the government as early as August 8. Soon the
Italians were in virtual occupation of the island of Majorca. German
and Italian tanks, munitions, anti-aircraft guns, and materiel of all kinds
flooded Franco territory. Entry was easy either by the sea or through
Portugal, which made little pretense of neutrality.

The reason for all this, from Franco's side, was very simple. He had
to have foreign troops, the ‘Aryan Moors" and the totalitarian “volun-
teers," because not enough Spaniards were fighting for him. From the
side of the interventionists it was simple too. The war was interpreted
as a struggle between Fascism and Communism; Hitler and Mussolini
would not brook a “Bolshevist" r%ime in Western Europe. Spain was
a perfect playground for them both politically and strategically. They
knew, too, that a Fascist Spain would drastically weaken France. They
delighted in the prospect of spheres of influence in Morocco and the
western Mediterranean. They had been watching Spain a long time;
General Sanjurjo visited Berlin just before the outbreak and the man
whom the Germans sent to General Franco as ambassador, General
Faupel, was head of an “Iberian Bureau" in Berlin. Ties with Rome
were also close. Italy to some extent, and especially Germany, had
hungry eyes on Spanish ore and minerals, and before the war had pro-
ceeded six months cargoes of copper and iron were going to Hamburg
to pay for German intervention. Both Germany and Italy recognized the
Franco government by November.

Franco, interestingly enough, scoffed at Fascism at the beginning. Jay
Allen of the Chicago Tribune and London News Chronicle, one of the
most experienced of American correspondents in Spain, saw him on
July 28 — ^when the war was only ten days old — ^for a historic interview
and Franco told him, “This movement is not fascist, it is Spanish and
nationalist. . . . Fascism is ridiculous in Spain, ridiculous. The liberal
middle class in Spain is all republican, masonic, and things like that.
Fascism in Germany and Italy is a middle-class movement. Here these
boys of Primo de Rivera's say they are fascists because it is the thing to
say, but they are ridiculous."

Before long General Franco saw his need of German and Italian aid.

INSIDE EUROPE

324

and when he had to pay for this aid he began to pipe a very different
tune.

Such emphatic intervention by Germany and Italy— by the spring of
1937 the Germans had eight to ten thousand technicians in Spain, the
famous Condor Legion, and the Italians almost 100,000 troops —
was bound to provoke retaliation. Counter-intervention took two forms.
First, volunteers from all over the world, liberals, anti-Fascists, com-
munists, socialists, flocked to Spain and formed the International Bri-
gade, motivated by common hatred of Fascist aggression. Such an army
had never been seen before. It included Poles, Belgians, Czechs, Ameri-
cans (some 2,700 from the U.S.A.), English, French, and anti-Fascist
Italians and anti-Nazi Germans. The Brigade, which reached a maxi-
mum force of perhaps 20,000 men, went into action November 8 and 9
in the defense of Madrid, and it saved the Capital. Second, beginning
m October, the government of the U.S.S R. sent tanks, airplanes, food,
and diplomatic counsel. No Russian troops arrived in Spain, but Russian
airplanes did, and their help was of great value ; their fast pursuit ships
built on the American model, called ‘"Chatos,” gave the loyalists tem-
porary command of the air by early spring.

The war dragged on. Terrible tales of atrocities disfigured the world’s
news. The rebels won several important offensives, for instance they
took Malaga in February, 1937, and Bilbao in June, but they could not
smash either the morale or the material defense of Madrid, and they got
nowhere near Barcelona or Valencia. The government won a great vic-
tory on the Guadalajara front in March, when an Italian army was cut
to pieces at Brihuega; the Italians lost more dead in this single engage-
ment than in the whole Abyssinian war. Italian prisoners testified that
they had “enlisted” for service in Ethiopia, and were in effect shanghaied
to Spain.

Horrors heaped on horrors dulled the palate of the world, but Franco’s
march into the Basque country in June, 1937, gave it a new sensation.
German aviators bombed and destroyed Guernica, the holy city of the
Basques, the first instance in history of the complete and willful oblitera-
tion of a whole city, non-combatants as well as fighters, by bombing and
machine-gunning from the air. Franco apologists have stated that the
Basques blew up their holy city and its inhabitants themselves. The testi-
mony of G. L. Steer, the correspondent of the London Ttmes on the spot,
gives, a somewhat different story:

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

225

The whole town of y,ooo inhabitants, plus 3,000 refugees, was slowly
and systematically pounded to pieces. Over a radius of five miles round
a detail of the raider’s technique was to bomb separate farmhouses. . , .
All the villages around were bombed. . . . Guernica was not a military
objective. A factory producing war material lay outside the town and was
untouched, . . . The town lay far behind the lines.

The rhythm of this bombing of an open town was ... a logical one;
first, hand grenades and heavy bombs to stampede the population, then
machine-gunning to drive them below, next heavy and incendiary bombs
to wreck the houses and burn them on top of the victims.

1 have seen and measured the enormous bomb-holes which, since
I passed through the town the day before, I can testify were not there
then. Unexploded German aluminum incendiary bombs found in
Guernica were marked “Rheindorf factory, 1936.”

In January, 1938 the loyalists, using their newly trained man power,
took Teruel, but Franco’s troops recaptured it the next month. The
rebels then pushed through to the sea, splitting loyalist Spain and
separating Barcelona from Valencia. The government withstood this
grave loss at first, and the loyalist troops not only held ground, but
made a great counter-offensive on the Ebro. During 1938 the non-
intervention committee — of which more presently — continued its de-
liberations, trying to evolve a formula for the withdrawal of foreign
troops. When this was finally hammered out, it was promptly accepted
by the loyalists, but rejected by Franco. In September the new loyalist
prime minister, Dr. Juan Negrin, announced at Geneva that the loyalist
government would remove all the foreigners on its side. The Interna-
tional Brigade was thereupon demobilized. Then came a ‘‘token with-
drawal” of 10,000 Italian troops. Meantime, the rebels sought to enforce
a rigid blockade of loyalist ports, and thus starve the government out.
Franco’s airplanes bombed neutral and especially British shipping per-
sistently, even British ships carrying officers of the non-intervention
patrol. Dozens of British ships were attacked.

The war persisted all through 1938, and came finally to an end early
in 1939. The government simply could not hold out against the pre-
ponderance of German and Itdian intervention. After pitiless air bom-
bardments of Barcelona Franco opened a great offensive by land which
captured Tarragona on January 14. Barcelona fell twelve days later;
the loyalist government withdrew first to Figueras, near the French
frontier, then to the frontier itself.^ But Madrid was still holding out.

2 The loyalist garrison in Minorca surrendered to a British cruiser, the Devon-
shire, which had Franco officers aboard.

226

INSIDE EUROPE

With desperate courage and persistence, Negrin and Del Vayo shuttled
to Madrid and back. Then, however, came an angry series of intrigues
and fissures. A coup d'etot by General Casado — ^instigated in part by
foreign influence — ^unseated Negrin, and his short-lived Council of Na-
tional Defense sued for peace. Franco occupied Madrid without resistance
on March 28.

Presently, the terrible machine of a new law, the ‘‘Law of Political
Responsibilities” went into action. Thousands upon thousands of
loyalist Spaniards were executed. In August Franco set up his new
regime under the dominating influence of the Falange, or Fascist, ele-
ment in his coalition. He himself undertook supreme authority, with
“responsibility only to God and history.”

Meantime the Germans finally admitted publicly the activity of their
Condor Legion, which marched down the streets of Berlin, and was re-
viewed by Hitler and Goering. The German U-boat commanders —
who got good practice for 1939 — ^were publicly honored. The Italians
revealed that, during the war, Italian aviators made 86,420 flights over
Spanish territory, and dropped more than eleven million kilograms of
explosives in 5,318 bombardments.® Italy lost 3,327 dead, 11,227
wounded, during the course of the war, according to Italian figures.

General Franco

It would be naive in the extreme to dismiss General Francisco Franco
as a villain or a butcher. He is a creature of his caste, a product of his
moral environment, and a fairly typical example of it. He has been
commended for intelligence and courage, and doubtless he possesses
social grace and charm. Beyond doubt, as he sees patriotism, he is a
patriot. But let it be remembered that he started the war, and that his
war destroyed half of Spain.

Franco is a first-rate example of a historical accident. He was not
scheduled to be the supreme leader of the rebels. The leader was Calvo
Sotelo, assassinated in July; General Sanjurjo, who was killed in an
airplane accident three days after the war began, was theoretically the
military chieftain. Franco stepped into his shoes. He was abler than the
rest, he was in a better strategic position, he had the Moors and Legion-
naires, and before the war was two months old he was indisputably in

® Cf. Bulletin of International News, published by the Royal Institute of Inter-
national Affairs, Vol. XVI, No. 12, p. (^.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 227

command. On October i, 1936, he was invested as head of the Spanish
‘'state.^'

General Franco, a small man, only a little over five feet, graceful,
paunchy, with tiny well-formed hands and feet, called the ‘‘Baby Gen-
eral,’’ was born in Galicia in 1892. He came of a family which had sent
its sons into the army or navy for generations. His brother Ramon was
Spain’s most distinguished aviator. Young Franco had an exceptionally
good military career. He saw service in Morocco, which taught him
much, and at thirty-four he became the youngest general in the Spanish
army. Under the republic he served in the Balearics and then again in
Morocco. When the Lerroux-Gil Robles combination took power he
was appointed chief of staff. This made the republicans suspicious, and
when the Popular Front assumed office he was shelved and packed off
to the Canary Islands.

Consider Jay Allen’s interview with this “graceful” and “idealistic”
little man :

Q. How long, now that your coup has failed in your objectives, is the
massacre to go on ?

A. There can be no compromise, no truce.

Q. That means you will have to shoot half Spain?

A. I repeat, at whatever cost.

Q. What would your government do if you won?

A. I would establish a military dictatorship.

Q. What would happen to the politicians of the republic?

A. Nothing, except that they would have to go to work.

Q. Why were you able to collaborate with the republic in apparent loy-
alty for so long ?

A. I collaborated loyally as long as I thought the republic represented
the national will.

Q. What about the February elections? Didn’t they represent the na-
tional will ?

A. Elections never do.

Franco tries to embrace as wide a Rightist front as possible. When, on
April 20, he proclaimed himself dictator and leader of a one-party
totalitarian state, he chose a comprehensive name for it: The Spanish
Phalanx of Traditionalist and Offensive National Syndicalist Juntas.

Franco’s admirers are lyrical in their praise. For instance this item
translated from the Paris Candide, by one Rene Benjamin :

“Franco is not tall, he is a little heavy, his body is timid. Ah ! His glance
is unforgettable, like that of all rare beings A troubled and trembling
glance, full of sweetness ; the man is delicious and mysterious ; he is a

228 INSIDE EUROPE

miracle of tenderness and energy . . . The ravishing thing about Franco
is his purity.”

(New York Sun, July 27, 1937.)

And Mr. J. L. Garvin, in a pitiful article in the London Observer, once
called him ''a great gentleman.” To which one might fairly reply that he
has broken his oath twice ; first to the king, when he took service with
the republic; then to the republic, when he rose against it.

The other general on the Rightist side most worth notice is that fab-
ulous creature General Don Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, who fought mostly
with his tongue. He was the broadcaster for the insurgent forces, and
over the radio from Seville gushed nightly on the exploits of his faction.
On August 27, he ordered the execution of five members of a communist
family for every person murdered by a communist. ''Colonel Yague
followed my instructions in Badajoz, and the result was admirable”
(when four thousand people were massacred in the bullring !), he roared
one night. He boasted that "Red” women would be turned over to the
Moors — one girl for each twenty Moors,

Terror

In the early days of the war a sporadic terror existed in both Madrid
and Barcelona. The fact is unpleasant, but there is no use denying it.
Churches were pillaged and wrecked, priests were murdered, and assassi-
nation of known Fascists occurred wholesale. The anarchists especially
ran wild. But let it be remembered that these events occurred after Fran-
co’s revolt, when the population as a whole was exasperated to frenzy.
The normal regulations of society broke down. Much of the killing oc-
curred after a stupid boast by General Mola that a "Fifth Column” of
Fascists, the rebel sympathizers living in the city, would rise within the
gates and help to capture it. Naturally they were hunted out and shot.
Every responsible person in the loyalist government deplored the terror
and sought to control it from the earliest days ; soon it was stamped out.

The terror on the rebel side was infinitely more severe ; killings took
place on definite orders of the generals and as a part of policy. When a
town was captured, known loyalists were shot out of hand. I have men-
tioned the horror of Badajoz. But Badajoz was only one of several ex-
amples. In the early days of the war, anyone who held a trade union card,
anyone who was a freemason, anyone who was known to have voted for
the Popular Front, anyone who scorned going to mass, was liable to be
executed.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

229

The London Times has stated that in Navarre “in practically every
village the three or four leading republicans are shot/' In Cordoba 2,000
people were executed and 1,800 in Saragossa. In Seville nine thousand
people were shot, in Granada 6,000, in Pamplona 3,000. Leaflets were
dropped by the rebels on Madrid reading as follows :

The capture of Madrid by the National Army being imminent, you are
warned that for every murder committed, ten of yours will be shot.
Do not forget that we hold over 1,000 of the Red Militia as prisoners in
the provinces, while in Madrid the 25,000 wounded will be held responsi-
ble for your excesses.

When Franco's forces captured Malaga the town knew what might be
coming. And, in an extraordinary mass exodus, almost one-third of the
inhabitants left the city before the Fascists entered, walking with what
possessions they could carry along the road to Almeria. They were will-
ing to suffer any privation, to desert their homes, to risk death on the
road — which was incessantly bombed — ^rather than live in a Franco city.
The terrible scenes which accompanied this flight of 150,000 men, women
and children have been described by American doctors who witnessed
them. Almost the same thing happened after the capture of Bilbao.
But there were no neutral witnesses.

Left

The proletarian situation in Spain was, before the war, the most com-
plicated in the world. The Left comprised several camps.

First, there were several groups of bourgeois republicans, represented
by men like Azana and his allies.

Second, there were the autonomists in Catalonia and the Basque coun-
try, who knew that the republic insured their freedom, which centralists
like General Franco would take away.

Third, one must always keep in mind that syndicalism in Spain, alone
among European countries, is a very powerful force. The Spanish labor
movement for several generations was almost equally divided between
socialist and s)mdicalist unions. The socialists, with their U.G.T. (Union
General de Trabaj adores), allied with the Second Internationale, were
strongest in Madrid and the north; the syndicalists, with their rival
C.N.T. (Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo), flourished especially in
Catalonia and Andalusia, with headquarters in Barcelona. Ever since
the days of Bakhunin, syndicalism has proliferated in these districts. It

INSIDE EUROPE

230

first took root when Marx and Bakhunin split on the anarchist issue in
1872.

The syndicalists, queer fish, have traditionally stood aloof from poli-
tics. Until recently they refused to vote. They were ‘'apolitical.’" Their
anarchist friends were a potent source of mischief, because the anarchists
do not believe in government at all, and therefore stood to gain from any
sort of chaos. In the old days it was a frequent maneuver of the Right
to bribe anarcho-syndicalists to make trouble, so that it could use the pre-
text for severe measures against more orderly opponents, like the social-
ists. Lerroux was a past master at this. Theoretically the syndicalists be-
lieve in a state founded on vertical trade unions. They began to take a
more normal interest in politics when they saw that Fascism was rising
in Spain, and would give them no mercy. They became willing to co-
operate with the more moderate Left. And almost for the first time
in history, tliey went to the polls and voted in February, 1936 —
with the Popular Front. Syndicalist votes helped make the Left victory
possible.

Fourth, the anarchists. They have their own organization in Spain,
the F,A.I. (Federacion Anarquista Ibera), which comprised only about
8,000 members but which “muscled into” the syndicalist C.N.T., and for
a time partially controlled it. The more responsible syndicalist leaders
then walked out of the C.N.T. to demonstrate solidarity with the govern-
ment.

Fifth, the socialists. These traditionally were moderate Marxists, but
one wing, led by Largo Caballero, jumped very much to the Left just
before the war and demanded an active revolutionary policy, partly as a
maneuver to gain syndicalist support. The Caballero group went to the
Left of the communists ; the joke in Spain during the February elections
was “Vote communist to save Spain from Marxism."" The other wing
of the socialist party, led by Indelacio Prieto, was more moderate. A
very rich newspaper owner and industrialist from the Basque country,
Prieto wanted to cooperate with Azana and the government. Later he
was forced out.

Sixth, the communists. These were a minor factor in Spain until the
war broke out. There were only 16 communist deputies in a Cortes of
473. The socialists and syndicalists had skimmed the cream of radical
Spain.

Seventh, the P.O.U.M. (Party of Marxist Unification), which began
as a dissident communist group, led by Andres Nin and Joaquin Maurin.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 231

Its strength was mostly in Barcelona. In 1936 it became frankly defeatist
and Trotskyist and was presently suppressed.

When the war came Madrid had three cabinets in twenty-four hours.
The Left Republicans carried on, but in September they collapsed; the
government was not prosecuting the war efficiently. On September 6,
Largo Caballero formed a government in which five men beside himself
were socialists. Del Vayo became minister of foreign affairs, and Prieto
minister of marine and air. Two communists were included, to reflect
the realities of the situation, one Basque nationalist, one Catalan, and two
republicans. Later, the government was further enlarged and the syn-
dicalists came in.

Francisco Largo Caballero held office until the spring of 1937. His
integrity was beyond question, his prestige was great, his patience was
tenacious. But he was a failure. He wasn’t winning the war. Nor was
he making the social revolution he had promised. For one thing he was
too old for the job — ^sixty-seven — and not in the best of health ; the story
is that he went to bed at 9 P.M. every night, and nothing could happen
in loyalist Spain thereafter. Caballero was the perfect type of trade union
boss. A worthy character, who had devoted his whole life to the Spanish
proletariat ; he was a manual worker as a youth and until twenty he could
not read or write ; he went to jail seven times, and once was sentenced to
death.

He was succeeded by Dr. Juan Negrin on May 15, 1937. Not a com-
munist but a left-wing socialist, Negrin worked well with the commu-
nists — ^who were rising steeply in influence — ^as well as the republicans,
and his administration began on a note of competence and vigor. He
dropped the anarchists, after a serious anarchist rising was suppressed
in Barcelona. He muzzled Caballero and the P.O.U.M., and he strove
to devote the whole energy of loyalist Spain to the one supreme task —
winning the war. Negrin, only forty-eight, widely traveled, a brilliant
linguist, versatile, solid, urbane, was a doctor of medicine by profession.
He began to be interested in politics, and became a financial expert. He
had enormous integrity and courage. He performed almost superhuman
feats ; he fought the bitter struggle to the bitter end.

Non-Intervention

According to the normal canons of international law, any government
is entitled to purchase arms and munitions for suppression of a rebellion.

INSIDE EUROPE

232

Loyalist Spain was unable to do this. For one thing, General Franco's
navy— though the rebels had no belligerent rights — set up a quite illegal
but nevertheless efBcacious blockade. For another, the great powers ini-
tiated the monstrous fiction known as the “Non-Intervention Agree-
ment'" which established an embargo on the shipment of both munitions
and volunteers to both Spanish sides. This was an almost fatal handi-
cap to the loyalists They could get nothing in from France and not much
from the U.S S.R. But Italy and Germany sent great quantities of arms
and men to Spain before the pact was signed, and after its signature it
seemed that they violated it almost at will.'^

The Non-Intervention Pact was suggested by France and Britain in
the early days in order to keep the war from spreading. They thought that
a rigid system of non-intervention would prevent wholesale conflagra-
tion. The Pact was laboriously hammered out from August till Febru-
ary, against the incessant objections of Germany, Italy, and especially
Portugal — ^which hindered the negotiations at every opportunity — ^and
finally twenty-seven nations signed it; in April, 1937 an international
naval control was set up in Spanish waters.

The French point of view may be easily summarized. Most French-
men did not want Franco to win. A glance at the map will show why. A
Fascist victory in Spain might mean that France would have a third
frontier to defend in the event of war with Germany or Italy. Italian ot
German naval bases in the Balearics or Morocco would drastically shift
the balance of power in the Mediterranean, and might cut France's “life-
line" of communication to her African reservoir of native troops. Yet a
powerful section of French opinion favored General Franco for class
reasons. And the French were willing to make almost any concession,
even if the loyalists should be defeated, in order to stave off the peril of
immediate general war. The Fascists held their trump card again. They
committed acts of aggression knowing that the French and British would
not call the bluff because calling the bluff might mean war.

The Briti«ih attitude was similar. From the nationalist and imperialist
point of view a Franco victory would be an embarrassment to the British,
even if they bought Franco up later. It would imperil Gibraltar — ^mys-
terious guns dominating the harbor were set in place by Franco or his
allies early in the war — ^and give Italy and Germany a foothold in the
western Mediterranean. The Mediterranean is an essential link in im-

*The very day after the ^^gentleman's agreement” was signed between England
and Italy, 5,000 Italian troops landed at Cadiz.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 233

perial communications. But from the point of view of property, privilege,
and class, the British wanted Franco to win; they may like nationalism,'
but they like capitalism better. They quailed before the bogey of a Bol-
shevist Spam, of communism on the Pyrenees Thus the British were
divided by conflicting aims, stalemated by a dichotomy in policy. As a
result they gave way to muddle, drift, and what almost seemed cowardice
before repeated acts of aggression by the Fascists. They wanted peace
at almost any price — ^until their own gigantic armament program was
ready.

The Non-Intervention Pact endured an agitated life. On May 29 a
loyalist aviator bombed the German pocket-battleship Deutschland as she
was lying in Ibiza harbor Apparently the pilot mistook it for the rebel
cruiser Baleares. The Germans, in a rage, bombarded Almeria two days
later, a formal naval action by the German fleet against a Spanish town.
The hypocrisy of the Non-Intervention agreement passed belief. Italy
and Germany were theoretically part of an international scheme to pre-
vent foreign troops fighting in Spain while thousands of their own
troops were fighting there ! But little by little the pretense of non-inter-
vention was given up. When Franco's troops, largely Italian, captured
Santander, the battle was openly and flamboyantly celebrated in Italy as
an Italian victory.

The Leipzig incident came on June 19. Three torpedoes, it was alleged,
were fired by an unknown submarine at the German cruiser Leipzig off
Oran. No one ever saw the submarine. Comment was free to the effect
that the attack might have been invented It sent Hitler into a violent
tantrum ; Europe tottered on the brink of war.

In September, 1937 came another first-rate crisis. Submarines pre-
sumed to be Italian, enforcing Franco's blockade, set about torpedoing
neutral merchantmen in the Mediterranean. A dozen British, Greek,
Danish and other neutral ships were sunk in circumstances recalling the
unrestricted U-boat warfare of 1917. The “pirate" submarines, never
showing themselves, crept marauding not only in Spanish waters, but as
far away as the Aegean. The British and the small neutrals at first took
this affront without rebuttal, but when two Russian ships were tor-
pedoed and sunk, the Soviet government angrily demanded reprisals and
formally accused Italy of being the pirate power. A conference was called
at Nyon, Switzerland. Germany and Italy refused to attend, and it seems
that the categorical nature of the Russian note was designed to keep
them away. The British and French, their backs up at last, took decisive

INSIDE EUROPE

234

action. The Italians, absent, were outmaneuvered, and the British and
French fleets set up a powerful “piracy control'' in Mediterranean waters.
The sinkings stopped. But aerial bombardment of neutral shipping was
resumed later on.

Portugal

This small country, with a population less than that of London or
New York City, undeveloped, backward, pleasantly remote, lives by ex-
port of cork, fish, wine. Until the Spanish war it played a respectable and
peaceable role in international affairs. The country was a monarchy for
some seven hundred years ; in 1910 a revolution overthrew the Braganzas
and a republic came to power. Distractions and vicissitudes were many,
and in 1933, Professor Dr. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, born in 1894,
established a military dictatorship.

Professor Salazar, almost uniquely among dictators, was — and is — b,
recluse. He was an economist by profession, and from 1926 to 1933 he
served as minister of finance. Dictatorship was forced on him, he says.
A Jesuit, ascetic and devout, with hatred of pomp, he gained great re-
spect abroad for balancing the budget and funding the national debt.
Then the usual machinery of dictatorship came into action. A corporative
state of totalitarian character, called the Estado Novo ; an efficient secret
police and a private army in green shirts ; a militant youth movement ;
close association with the other Fascist powers ; a single political party
with Salazar at its head — ^the paraphernalia is familiar.

Professor Salazar once disguised himself as a customs official, worked
on incoming baggage himself — because he heard tales of delay and in-
efficiency in customs inspection. Once his tourist bureau offered a $5
prize for the corpse of any flea or bug found in a Portuguese hotel —
because a healthy tourist business is important to the country.

Portugal for many years was regarded as a satrapy of England. The
country is Britain's most venerable ally — ^the treaty of alliance dates from
A.D. 1373 — ^and Britain virtually controls its finance and foreign policy.
Portugal has an important colonial empire, a leftover from its ancient
imperial days. It cannot possibly protect this empire itself ; thus it plays
dose to Britain, and hopes for British help.

Chapter XV

Mussolini

I shall make my own life a masterpiece,

— Benito Mussolini

I am desperately Italicm, I believe in the function of Lahnity,

— Benito Mussolini

pENITO MUSSOLINI, tempestuous and ornate, a blacksmith's son,
^ the creator of modern Italy and the author of the Abyssinian war,
was bom July 29, 1883, at Dovia di Predappio, a village in the Romagna.
His career is that of the most formidable combination of turn-coat, ruf-
fian, and man of genius in modem history.

The obvious motivations, except poverty, are lacking. His father, a
revolutionary socialist, was the anarchist of the village square, yes ; but
no tragedy occurred in Mussolini's life to compare with the execution
of Lenin's elder brother, or Pilsudski's. His mother, a school-teacher, like
the mothers of most great men, was an exceptional woman, but her in-
fluence on Mussolini was, it seems, slight ; adoration of her never made
him, like Hitler, a prisoner of infantile fixations. Kamal Ataturk's
mother was mistreated by the Greeks, and years later the Turkish dictator
drove the Greeks into the sea ; in Mussolini's life there is no such dra-
matic and direct impulse to redemption.

Nor can one easily discover any extraordinary personal accidents
without which the Duce might have lived and died a blacksmith's boy in
Forli. It is quite possible, as Bertrand Russell has pointed out, that the
revolution in Russia might never have occurred had not a German gen-
eral permitted Lenin to travel across Germany in a sealed train. It is
quite probable that Soviet Russia would have never had a Five-Year
plan had not Trotsky succumbed to a fit of pique and refused to attend
Lenin's funeral. The Dollfuss dictatorship in Austria was, as we shall
see, made possible because a socialist deputy went to the bathroom
during a crucial parliamentary vote. Such personal accidents, which
play a large part in history, are not prominent in Mussolini's life. He
made his own luck. His career has been a growth, steady and luxuriant,
like that of some monstrous weed.

235

INSIDE EUROPE

236

The chief personal influence on Mussolini as a young man was prob-
ably that of a Russian exile in Switzerland, Madame Angelica Balabanov.
She took care of him in his early revolutionary days, mended his health,
gave him food of both the body and the spirit. Mussolini, a bricklayer,
apparently met Lenin through Balabanov. Years later Lenin rebuked
the Italian socialists for having “lost” Mussolini, their best man.

Every man is an arena, a pool, of forces. Those in Mussolini’s early
life were mostly literary and intellectual. Voraciously intelligent, he read
Marx, Hegel, Machiavelli, La Salle, Nietzsche, Pareto, Sorel. He ab-
sorbed them like a blotter. From Nietzsche he learned to hate the mob,
from Marx to love it. He records that in his early days he kept a medal-
lion of Marx in his pocket.

Bombastes Furioso

The son of Alessandro Mussolini (who named him after Benito
Jaurez, the Mexican revolutionist who ordered the execution of the
Emperor Maximilian) and of Rosa Maltoni who was the school-teacher
of the village, he grew up in the most crushing poverty. He never tasted
coifee until he was twenty. He slept on a bundle of hay instead of a
mattress, and the bedroom in his birthplace, which has been made a
museum, preserves this symbol of extreme indigence. Mussolini often
returns to his native village, and has built a model farm in the vicinity.
Unlike Hitler, he takes some interest in the lives of his surviving
relatives.

Though his father was a blacksmith, the family for generations had
tilled the soil Speaking to an assembly of peasants in October, 1935,
he said: “The sort of people who like to rummage among old papers
thought they would please me by discovering that my ancestors were
of noble birth. So I said to them, ‘Stop it.’ All my grandfathers, all my
great-grandfathers were tillers of the soil, and to remove all doubts of
it I stuck a tablet on the wall of the old farm which says that gen-
erations of Mussolinis before me have always tilled the soil with their
own hands.”

Mussolini, at his mother’s insistence, went to a religious school (like
Stalin and Kamal Ataturk), though his father was an extreme anti-
clerical. Then he taught school himself, at a wage of 56 lire (then
$10.25) per month, until he fled to Switzerland — ^note well — ^to avoid
military service This was when he was nineteen. He earned a living as
a mason and a laborer in a chocolate factory; he was hungry often, and

MUSSOLINI

237

Balabanov describes how on one occasion he snatched food from two
Englishwomen picnicking in a park. At night he studied socialism.
Becoming an agitator, he got into trouble with the police, and was
jailed and expelled from one Swiss canton after another. Altogether, in
Italy as well as Switzerland, Mussolini was arrested eleven times.

He hated jail; he despised the moral obloquy and physical discom-
forts of confinement. Once he was finger-printed by the Geneva police,
he has loathed Switzerland ever since, and it is not fanciful to assume
that his dislike of the League of Nations was partly conditioned by this
early Genevan insult. Certainly Mussolini’s prison experiences caused
his present pronounced claustrophobia. Once he refused to enter the
Blue Grotto in Capri. And it is obvious that his famous predilection for
enormous rooms, like his office in the Palazzo Venezia, which is sixty
feet by forty by forty, is over-compensation for early confinement in small
prison cells.

Mussolini returned to Italy in 1904 at the age of twenty-one and
spent ten years as a red-hot socialist.

He earned a living the while by teaching school and by incessant jour-
nalism. Not as great a pamphleteer as Shaw or Trotsky, he is neverthe-
less one of the best journalists alive. An early venture into creative
writing, a novel called The Cardinal's Mistress, was not successful; it
was, however (I quote Francis Hackett), '‘hard, violent, cynical, proud,
strong, and troubled.” He also wrote a biography of John Huss. At
Forli in 1909 he founded his own paper. La Lotta di Classi (The Class
Struggle), and it made him known among socialists and revolutionaries
all over Italy. In 1912 he became editor of the Avanti, the official
socialist daily, and he trebled its circulation in three months. Previously
he had spent some time in Trento, then in Austria, and this experience
in irredentism awakened something cardinal in his character — ^na-
tionalism.^ In 1914 he was one of the organizers of “Red Week,” an
attempt at socialist uprising in the Romagna.

The immense catastrophe of the Great War amputated his socialist
career. The Orthodox socialists wanted Italian neutrality; Mussolini
stood for intervention on the side of the allies. “To know why he became
a warrior,” says Dr. Finer in his penetrating and exhaustive Mussolini's

^ He was arrested by the Austrian police and deported. The man who got him
out of jail was the Viennese socialist Ellenbogen, who, twenty-five years later, was
himself arrested following the February “revolt” in Austria, which was the result
of Mussolini’s Austrian policy.

INSIDE EUROPE

238

Italy, “it is hardly necessary to do more than observe his physique/’
On political nationalist grounds and purely personally through love of
adventure, Mussolini wanted war. He gave up the editorship of Avanfi
and was expelled from the socialist party. When his former comrades
howled him down, he shouted, with rare psychological discernment,
*'You hate me because you still love me.” A few months later, he
founded the newspaper he still directs, Popolo d'ltalia, French money —
since France was eager to drag Italy into the War — ^helped him.

Mussolini, so recently an anti-militarist, sounded a violent call to
arms. “We must distinguish between war and war,” he said, “as we dis-
tinguish between crime and crime, between blood and blood. . . . We
are not, and we do not wish to be, mummies, everlastingly immovable.
We are men, and live men, who wish to give our contribution, however
modest, to historical creation” (Finer, p. loi). He did not, however,
go to the Front himself until December, 1916, and he had only thirty-
eight days in the trenches when he was wounded through the stupidity
of an officer who ordered him to fire one more shell from a trench-
mortar, though Corporal Mussolini pointed out that the gun was red
hot It exploded ; four privates were killed and Mussolini’s backside was
splintered with forty wounds. He was in hospital for seven months.
This, at least, is the official version of the incident.

After the War, on March 23, 1919, Mussolini formed the first Fasci
M Combattimento, mostly from men who had joined him early in the
war demanding intervention. He was still a socialist, though not a
member of the party ; his first program asked an eighty-five per-cent tax
on war profits. He disliked and distrusted the bourgeoisie and capitalist
aristocracy. “Fascio” is simply the Italian word for group or bundle ; to
Mussolini it conveniently symbolized the “Fasces” of Imperial Rome.
The original Fascists were augmented by local correspondents of the
Popolo d'ltalia in Lombardy, who organized the movement. It was not
a party at first, but a militia. Its chief strength was among ex-soldiers,
especially the arditi, front-line volunteers. “We, the survivors, who have
returned,” Mussolini wrote, “demand the right of governing Italy.”

The movement developed speedily. Its roots were those which grew
analogously in Germany and produced Hitler later: unemployment
among the ex-soldiers, the weakness of democratic cabinets, parlia-
mentary corruption, powerful nationalist feeling, restlessness on the
Left coupled with dissatisfaction at orthodox international socialism.
As Mussolini became stronger, the army backed him, exactly as the

MUSSOLINI

239

Reichswehr backed Hitler. The politicians, watching him warily, tried to
buy his movement; Giolitti was the Italian Papen. The industrialists,
precisely as in Germany, prepared to give his machine support

Labor troubles shook Italy in 1920 and 1921. The workmen rose
against intolerable wages and living conditions. Mussolini appears to
have first supported the “Occupation of the Factories,” when six hun-
dred thousand workers in the industrial north attempted to take over
the means of production. The Occupation was a failure, partly because
socialist leadership was weak. This made it easier for Mussolini to
appeal to the mob. But the legend that he “saved” Italy from Bol-
shevism was nonsense. Even Italians do not believe this any more.

By 1921 and 1922 Mussolini steadily expanded his influence, and by
a weapon which later dictators were to imitate — ^violence. He became
a sort of gang chieftain. (He was still an active journalist, however;
he covered the Cannes Conference in 1922 and sought interviews with
Briand and Lloyd George. This trip taught him, he records, his first
lesson in the mysteries of foreign exchange, when he discovered to his
shame that an Italian lira was not worth as much as a French franc.)
Mussolini’s gangs slugged their way to power in half a dozen districts.
Balbo in Ferrara, Grandi in Bologna, Farinacci in Cremona, attacked
the “reds.” Virtual civil war, of a minor guerrilla type, terrorized Italy.
Mussolini still claimed, theoretically, to be a socialist, but to gain power
he had to have an enemy ; thus he fought the working classes, under the
pretense that he was “liberating” them.

The full reaction — and more violence — came after the March on
Rome, in October, 1922. As prime minister he was simply a gang
leader who had become big enough to bluff the government into sub-
mission. He did not demand full power until he was quite certain that
the army would not oppose him and when he was sure that the King
would make him prime minister. The March on Rome was not, of
course, a March on Rome at all ; the Fascists took possession of a num-
ber of cities, with the army, “neutral,” standing aside. Mussolini trav-
eled to Rome by sleeping-car, and the fifty thousand Fascists who had
assembled in Rome quietly dispersed the next day.

After 1922 Mussolini’s history is familiar. He formed a coalition
government, then, like Hitler ten years later, kicked the non-Fascists
out. He was supported by Morgan loans. His only severe crisis till the
Abyssinian war in 1935 was the Matteotti affair. Most critics nowadays
do not think that the Duce directly ordered the assassination of Mat-

INSIDE EUROPE

240

teotti, the socialist leader, but his moral responsibility is indisputable.
What happened, good informants think, is not only that Mussolini
threatened Matteotti m the chamber, but angrily denounced him in
private, spurting irritably at mention of his name. One can easily
imagine him exploding to his underlings, '"That Matteotti — (Sim-
ilarly, by a chance remark, Henry II caused the murder of Thomas a
Becket.) The underlings, taking the hint, and thinking to gain favor
with the Duce, went ahead on their own initiative and kidnaped and
murdered the young socialist. Such a sequence of events is convenient
for a dictator; if the business turns out 'Svell,’’ the result is simple
gain, if it turns out badly, viz., makes a scandal, the dictator can disclaim
complicity. Mussolini, however, was bold enough to admit his respon-
sibility ; and he had to concede that the murderers were Fascists of ‘'high
station.” Indeed some of his closest associates were involved. In a
famous speech to the chamber he blustered his way out as follows :

“But after all, gentlemen, what butterflies are we looking for under
the arch of Titus? Well, I declare here before this assembly, before all
the Italian people, that I assume, I alone, the political, moral, historical
responsibility for everything that has happened. If sentences, more or
less maimed, are enough to hang a man, out with the noose! If Fas-
cism has only been castor oil or a club, and not a proud passion of the
best Italian youth, the blame is on me !”

(Mussolini^s Autobio graphy, p. 231.)

This, be it noted, is almost the same technique that Hitler followed
after the June 30 murders. He too assumed all responsibility; and
in Italy and Germany both, this removed the burden of bad conscience
from large quarters of the nation. The Matteotti affair, however, shook
the Duce deeply. But on the whole it was of great value to him, because
following it he was able to isolate and thus the most conveniently
destroy the opposition.^

^^And Changes Fill the Cup of Alterations^

It is interesting in the light of the Abyssinian campaign to think back
to the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-12 and recollect that Mussolini vig-
orously opposed it. This war, also fought in Africa, seemed to Mussolini,
then a socialist, an imperialist crime. He organized an anti-war strike in
Forli, and spent five months in prison as a result. He wrote that the

* The actual assassins of Matteotti got very light sentences. One was an American
gangster from St. Louis.

MUSSOLINI

241

newspaper articles evoked by the Lybian war were ^'manifestations,
typical, qualified, and cynical, of nationalist delirium tremens.”

In one editorial in the Avanti he wrote a passage which read strangely
at the time of the Abyssinian war in 1935 :

''We are in the presence of a nationalist, clerical, conservative Italy
which proposes to make of the sword its law, of the army the nation’s
school. Vv^e foresaw this moral perversion; it does not surprise us. But
those who think that preponderance of militarism is a sign of strength
are wrong. Strong nations do not have to descend to the sort of insane
carnival in which the Italians are indulging to-day ; strong nations have
a sense of proportion. Nationalist, militarist Italy shows that it lacks
this sense. So it happens that a miserable war of conquest is celebrated
as a Roman triumph'" (italics mine).

{Daily Express, October 19, 1935.)

Dr. Finer has unearthed a precious quotation of similar vintage.
"Imagine an Italy,” wrote Mussolini indignantly in 1912, "in which
thirty-six millions should all think the same, as though their brains were
made in an identical mold, and you would have a madhouse, or rather, a
kingdom of utter boredom or imbecility.”

To which the detached observer might reply. Even so!

Man Mussolini

Most people meeting Mussolini are surprised at his shortness of
stature. He is, like Napoleon, only five feet six. His shoulders are power-
ful and his hands finely formed and almost delicate. His smile is
gritty. Usually he wears the uniform of a corporal in the Fascist
Militia.® He works in the Palazzo Venezia, in the center of Rome, and
lives about ten minutes away by car, in the Villa Torlonia, a comfortable
house with a luxuriant garden on the Via Nomentana, near the Porta
Pia. A Roman aristocrat, Prince Torlonia, offered the villa to Mussolini
because he couldn’t afford its upkeep; now he would like to have it
back, but Mussolini has fallen in love with the place, especially the
garden.

For some years his wife, Donna Rachele Guidi, was a virtual exile
in Milan, but now she lives in the Villa Torlonia. Donna Rachele, whose
origins are obscure, was, according to one story, a waitress in a Forli
pub, according to another the servant of Mussolini’s father after he
retired from blacksmithing, according to a third the daughter of his

® Note the Napoleonic significance.

INSIDE EUROPE

242

father's first wife by a different marriage and thus the Duce's step-
sister. She has borne Mussolini five children.

Indeed Mussolini is the only contemporary dictator conspicuously
fecund; he is also the only dictator with a very strong regard for
family life. Like Napoleon (and Hindenburg) he trusts members of
his immediate family, and not many other people. For years his only real
friend was his brother Arnaldo, who succeeded him as editor of the
Popolo d' Italia: Mussolini telephoned him from Rome to Milan almost
every evening. Arnaldo's sudden death was a serious blow to the Duce.
His daughter Edda, who is his living image, is the only person who
dares to twit or heckle him ; he adores her. Her husband, Count Galeazzo
Ciano, became Mussolini's Press-director, then the leader of the Disperata
squadron of bombing and pursuit planes in Ethiopia, and finally his
foreign minister. Mussolini's two elder sons, Vittorio, then nineteen,
and Bruno, seventeen, also went to the war as aviators. As if to give
the two younger children, Romano and Anna Maria, a touch of the air,
Mussolini himself piloted the plane which gave them their first ex-
perience off the ground.

Young Vittorio was so indiscreet as to publish an account of his ad-
ventures in Ethiopia. Listen :

still remember the effect I produced on a small group of Galla
tribesmen massed around a man in black clothes. I dropped an aerial
torpedo right in the center, and the group opened up like a flowering
rose. It was most entertaining."

During his great years of power, Mussolini's health was robustly
excellent, partly as a result of attention to a severe regimen. But in
1939 reports were widely credited that he was ill with heart trouble.
Shortly after he became prime minister he was desperately ill with a
stomach ailment; he eats very little nowadays but milk and fruit. He
told a recent American interviewer, pointing to a basket of fruit on the
table, "That is the secret of my continued health — ^fruit, fruit, fruit. In
the morning I have a cup of coffee and fruit ; at noon I have soup or
broth and fruit, and at night I have fruit. I never touch meat, but some-
times I have a little fish," He loves exercise, and takes a lot of it:
riding in the Torlonia gardens, fencing, swimming, hiking. He neither
drinks nor smokes. He was fond of women in his younger days, but
for the last few years he has paid little attention to them.^

* But early in 1937 a French lady, Madame de Pontages, told a dramatic story
of his tempestuous attentions.

MUSSOLINI

243

Mussolini is built like a steel spring. (Stalin is a rock of sleepy granite,
by comparison, and Hitler a blob of ectoplasm.) Mussolini’s ascetic
frugality is that of a strong man who scorns indulgence because he has
tasted it often and knows that it may weaken him ; Hitler’s, that of a weak
man fearful of temptation. Stalin, on the other hand, is as normal in
appetites as a buffalo.

The Duce has no social life. When, as a foreign minister, it is incum-
bent on him to entertain, he greets his guests not at the Palazzo Venezia
or the Villa Torlonia but in a hotel he hires for the occasion. No friend
of the rich, he despises the decadent and profligate Roman aristocracy.
He gave up the theater, of which he was very fond, because he could
not spare the time ; he sometimes has private movie shows at home. In
his autobiography, written in 1928, he says that in his first six years of
power he never once passed the threshold of an aristocrat’s salon or
even of a coffee house.

As a rule, Mussolini works very hard for five or six hours a day — *
except when a crisis makes more time necessary — ^and spends the rest of
the day in reading, meditation, or exercise. He is neat, precise, orderly ;
as Ludwig® records, he hates the d peu prhs. His work is systematized
to the ultimate detail; he is a perfect executive, considering the florif-
erousness of other aspects of his character; he never leaves the Palazzo
Venezia till the day’s work is done.

He cares very little for money, though his large family makes him
less impervious to financial considerations than other dictators. His offi-
cial salary is 8,000 lire per month (about $660), but he has a drawing
account, “small, unspecified, and variable,” at the treasury. For his
autobiography he received $25,000 in America; he gave some of it to
the Rome poor. For a long period his chief source of income was $1,500
per week from the Hearst press; early in 1935, however, he gave up
writing regular articles because international politics were so delicate
that he could not express himself frankly. He gave a share of his
Hearst income to Margherita Sarfatti, his biographer, who helped him
prepare the articles. Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo was rich, because the
Popolo d’ Italia was — ^and is — z. prosperous newspaper; its director now
is Mussolini’s nephew.

The Duce is the only modern dictator who has come to terms with
religion. In 1929 the Lateran Treaty adjusted the relations of church
and state in Italy, Shortly thereafter Mussolini and the then Pope, strong

® Cf. Talks with Mussolini, by Emil Ludwig, a fascinating record.

INSIDE EUROPE

244

characters both, clashed over the education of Fascist youth; in 1932
the Duce went to the Vatican, knelt in prayer, and, it is believed, took
holy communion. He was an avowed atheist, like his father, in youth;
latterly he has become very religious. He prays daily. His wedding-gift
to Edda was a golden rosary; his youngest child, Anna Maria, was his
first to be given a religious name.

The most accessible of Europe’s statesmen for a long time, Mussolini
saw an enormous number of people. Nowadays, however, he cuts down
on appointments, partly because of his reported ill-health. His first visitor
every day is the chief of police (Alexander of Jugoslavia likewise saw
a security official the first thing every morning) . The Duce, pervasively
curious, interested in human nature, and an accomplished brain-tapper,
like Franklin Roosevelt, enjoys his visitors. Finer quotes him as saying
that he has given over sixty thousand audiences ; he has interested him-
self in 1,887,112 individual "'affairs of citizens.”

Mussolini listens to people — ^but he seldom takes advice. He alone
makes decisions. When he wishes, he can make himself as inaccessible
as a Tibetan Lama. During the Geneva crises in 1935, when he was in a
roaring temper, no one could get near him. Baron Aloisi and others
made reports; he listened or not, as he chose. Mussolini is proud of
having thousands of acquaintances, and — ^v^dth Arnaldo dead — ^no friends ;
he told Ludwig that he trusted "no one.” This remark was expurgated
from the Italian translation of Ludwig’s book, since many Italians have
served the Duce well and think that they deserve his trust.

A very good journalist himself, he likes newspaper men. But he is
very much a prima donna, and needs careful handling. He is never
"charming”; he is contemptuous of all but the most skillful flattery; he
may be brutal, gruff, cheerful, or stentorian, depending on his mood,
which he seldom bothers to gloss over or conceal. He pays intelligent
interlocutors the compliment of interviewing them; sometimes he asks
many more questions than he answers. Boldness is the best avenue to
his favor. I remember seeing Francis Hackett after his interview for the
Survey Graphic, a little breathless because he had dared to ask a su-
premely audacious question: "Where, Your Excellency, would you have
been in your career, if you had applied to yourself the Fascist virtues of
discipline, loyalty and obedience?”^

Interviews, Mussolini knows, are the best of all possible forms of
propaganda ; thus he is so lavish with them. Most newspaper men — ^and

® Rather weakly Mussolini replied that “the war” had changed things.

MUSSOLINI

245

their editors — cannot resist the flattery of conversation with a dictator
or head of a state ; once they have been received by Mussolini or Hitler,
they feel a sense of obligation which warps their objectivity It is very
difficult for the average correspondent to write unfavorably about a
busy and important man who has just donated him a friendly hour of
conversation.

A British interviewer saw Mussolini recently and, rare phenomenon,
Mussolini laughed at one of his remarks. Preparing a draft of the inter-
view, the correspondent wrote, "'The Duce’s laughter encouraged me to
make one criticism of the Fascist regime, that it permitted very little
expression of humor.” Reading the draft for approval before publica-
tion (as he does with most interviews), Mussolini sternly elided the
reference to the fact that he had laughed. Dictators never laugh!

Two newspaper men were the source of the only recorded instance of
public embarrassment of the Duce. He was in Locarno to initial the
security pact of 1925. (Incidentally, from that day until he visited Ger-
many in 1936, he never stepped off Italian soil ; before that, he had as
prime minister been abroad only twice ; he attended the Lausanne con-
ference in 1922, and in 1923 fleetingly visited London.) His regime had
just taken over the great liberal newspapers of Italy; the corps of inter-
national correspondents resented this, and boycotted his Press confer-
ence. Annoyed, pouting, Mussolini found himself surrounded in the
hotel lobby by the journalists who had slighted him. He addressed
George Slocombe of the London Daily Herald, a conspicuous red-
bearded figure, whom he had met covering the conference of Cannes.
“Ha 1 ” exclaimed Mussolini surlily. “How are your communist friends
getting on?” Slocombe replied with perfect good temper, “I am not a
communist, Monsieur le President, but a socialist.” “Ha!” Mussolini
snorted again, “then I am mistaken.” Whereupon a Dutch correspond-
ent, George Nypels, piped out, “And it is not the first time.”

Mussolini reads all the time; no modern statesman except perhaps
Masaryk is so well acquainted with current literature. He keeps a sys-
tematic notebook of his reading. He astounded Ludwig by the range
and accuracy of his historical knowledge. Like most people who like to
read, he likes to write, and he writes extremely well. He compressed in
the dozen pages of his pamphlet on Fascism what it analogously took
Hitler six hundred pages to express in Mein Kampf, He is easily the
best educated as well as the most sophisticated of the dictators — ^he
is the only modern ruler who can genuinely be termed an intellec-

INSIDE EUROPE

246

tual— and he taught himself both French and German, which he speaks
expertly. In about 1925 he began to learn English, so that he might
read the political editorials in the London Times, He chose an English
newspaperwoman, Miss Gibson, as his teacher. He writes often — ^anony-
mously — ^for the Popolo dTtalia; he is part author of one play, Campo
di Maggio, dealing with Napoleon during the Hundred Days, and the
author of another, not yet produced, about the chief of his heroes,
Julius Csesar.

The things that Mussolini hates most are Hitler, aristocrats, money,
cats, and old age. He detests old people, especially old women. He dis-
likes references to the fact that he is a grandfather; and when, on July
29, 1933, he reached the age of fifty, the Italian Press was not allowed
to mention it. The things that Mussolini loves most are the city of Rome
(he has assiduously fostered the “cult of Rome’"), his daughter Edda,
peasants, books, airplanes, and speed.

He is apt to straddle a motorcycle, and like the late Colonel Lawrence
hurl himself across country at night. He learned to pilot an airplane
shortly after the war, and recoxmts in his autobiography a number of
crashes and forced landings, from which he escaped miraculously, and
which intensely exhilarated him.

'^The Race by Vigor, Not by Vaunts, Is Won^^

From the complex strands of Mussolini^s character one may draw
bright and brittle threads indicating the sources of his power.

He has, first of all, spine and starch, in a country sometimes lacking
both.

For all his bombast and braggadocio,*^ his intelligence is cold, analyti-
cal, deductive, and intensely realistic.

His flaming egoism, his sacro egoismo, is cherished by Italians. His
vanity is, as is obvious, extreme; for instance he stabilized the lira at
nineteen to the dollar, far too high a rate, mostly to better the figure
chosen by the French. He was called a paranoiac as far back as 1910.

Overwhelmingly he is a man of action. The single episode that amazed
him most about the 30th of June in Germany was that Hitler consumed
five hours talking to a man (Roehm) who was potentially a traitor.

His intuition, personal and political, is sensitive. He says : “I cannot

’My colleague, F. A. Voigt, has noted that only the countries where grand opera
nourishes have produced Fascism,

MUSSOLINI

247

change myself. I am like the beasts. I smell the weather before it
changes. If I submit to my instincts, I never err.*’

He is an orator of the pen. He wrote his way to power.

Like all dictators, he is implacable. No Hitler, no Stalin, no Musso-
lini, has ever forgiven an enemy.

He IS no hypocrite. He never made any secret of his ambition, which,
he said frankly, was to seize power and stay in power as long as possible.
On the other hand, he insists that he is no mere ‘‘profiteer in patriotism.”
Duty to Italy is his passion. “Is it lust for power that possesses me?”
he once said. “No, I believe, in all conscience, no Italian thinks this.
Not even my worst adversary. It is duty. A precise duty towards the
revolution and towards Italy.” (Finer, p. 295.)

His histrionic ability is extreme. No modern politician except possibly
Trotsky is so good an actor.

He distinctly has a “world sense” of politics. Hitler thinks of Germany
as an isolated entity; Mussolini knows well that the world contains much
aside from Italy.

Above all, he possesses a passionate physical magnetism. His vitality
expresses itself in every gesture ; when he salutes, for instance, he shoots
out his arm with such intensity you think the hand may fall off. This
vitality is readily absorbed by others. When he arrives before troops
ready for review, his presence has almost the effect of an electric shock.

Among more negative qualities in Mussolini the following might be
mentioned :

He is intensely touchy. A journalist well known to him, whom he
admired, visited Italy in August, 1935, and wrote a quite objective story
saying that the Abyssinian campaign was not universally popular. Mus-
solini saw it (he reads most of his press cuttings) and canceled an
appointment for an interview, a few hours before it was to take place.
Again, a minor instance, he caused the Italian number of Fortune, which
was very fair to him, to be suppressed in Italy, largely it is believed
because of one remark, quoting him (in his early days) as follows:
“What do I do first when I wake up? Jump straight out of bed! No
matter how beautiful the head beside me on the pillow.”

He is superstitious. Early in his career he had accepted, among the
thousands of gifts which poured in on him, an Egyptian mummy. Then
Lord Carnarvon, excavator of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, died. Musso-
lini ordered the mummy to be removed. He woke up the staff of the

INSIDE EUROPE

248

Palazzo Chigi (where he then worked) to have it instantly taken away,
his fright of it having descended on him late at night.

His claustrophobia I have mentioned. It is possible also that his reck-
less addiction to speed and violent movement is compensation for the
days when prison cells bound his steps to six feet by four.

He is, like many Italians, inclined to be suspicious. For instance,
when the King phoned him from Rome to Milan offering him the
premiership, he did not disbelieve the message, but refused to act on it
until it should be confirmed by an official telegram.

He is not strikingly original. Many of his ideas are derivative. Ideo-
logically Fascism is the distorted creation of Marx, Nietzsche, and Sorel.
Mussolini did not invent the Fascist salute, which was a suggestion of
d'Annunzio’s ; he did not devise the symbol of the Black Shirt, which
he copied from the uniform of the arditi.

He is occasionally capable of humility. "‘A man in my position,’' he
told Ludwig, “must be stupid at least once a week.”

Mussolini, who is quite aware of the complexities of his character,
*^ad with interest a serial discussion of it in a Fascist newspaper. Then
he telegraphed the local prefect: “Be so good as to send for the editor
and ask him to close his series of articles with the following statement !
Inasmuch as Mussolini himself says that he does not know exactly
what he is, it is somewhat difficult for others to find out.’ ”

After his visit to Rome in 1926, Francis Hackett wrote : “Mussolini
is an Italian masterpiece, all shade and all sun, concrete, bold, and
tangible. ... He is the hero of one of those terrific dramas of upstart
genius which in England lead to Parliament Hill and in Italy to Vesuvius.
Mussolini is Vesuvian. He is capable of a rush of blood to the head, a
tower of rage, a surge of demoniac willfulness, that may end in smoke,
lava, destruction,” Hackett wrote with Corfu in mind. Nine years later
came Abyssinia.

He is nothing if not frank. In October, 1936, he said in a speech in
Bologna, “I hold out a great olive branch to the world. This olive branch
springs from an immense forest of eight million bayonets, well-sharpened
and thrust from intrepid young hearts.” {Bulletin of International News,
Vol. XIII, No. 10.)

In an interview with a German journalist he exclaimed, “We have
made a big step forward. We have forged the Rome-Berlin axis. This is
the beginning of a European consolidation process. Understand — I do
not believe in the United States of Europe. That is a Utopia, an impos«

MUSSOLINI

249

sibility with historical and geo-political limitations. ... We are ex-
periencing a change of epoch, a total break-up of political and social
ideologies. The democracies are done for. They are . . . centers of in-
fection. . . . The future turns away from collectivism, from the uncer-
tain reaction of the masses. Democracies are like sand, like shifting sand.
Our State-political ideal is rock-granite peaks.”

Soon the Duce began to back up his words — ^in Spain.

Violence

“There are those who have to be crushed by truth before they can understand it.**

— Mussolini,

“Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation**

— ^Trctsky.

Mussolini’s first published work, written when he was twenty-one
under the strong influence of Nietzsche, was an essay on the philosophy
of force. The concept of force has always fascinated him. Yet, as he
says, violence should be “surgical,” not “sporting”; defining the terror
in Italy as “national prophylactics,” he wrote that certain “individuals
should be removed from circulation as the doctor removes an infected
person from circulation.” At one point in his career, early in 1921, he
resigned — extremely temporarily — ^the leadership of the Fascist move-
ment, in protest at violence which he considered excessive by squadristi
bands. He did not, however, abolish the squadristi till 1927, when their
work with castor oil and clubs was safely done.

Mussolini’s considered opinion on the subject of violence is the
following :

“Was there ever a government in history that was based exclusively
on the consent of the people and renounced any and every use of force?
A government so constituted there never was and there never will be.
Consent is as changeable as the formations in the sands of the seashore.
We cannot have it always. Nor can it ever be total. No government has
ever existed which made all its subjects happy. Whatever solution you
happen to give to any problem whatsoever, even though you share the
Divine wisdom, you would inevitably create a class of malcontents. . . .
How are you going to avoid that this discontent spread and constitute a
danger for the solidarity of the state? You avoid it with force — ^by
employing force inexorably whenever it is rendered necessary Rob any
government of force and leave it only with its immortal principles, and
that government will be at the mercy of the first group that is organized
and intent on overthrowing it.”

(Finer, p. 223.)

250

INSIDE EUROPE

There have been five or six attempts to assassinate Mussolini ; he is
a profound fatalist, but not so much so that severe precautions to guard
him are not taken. The story is that only one man m Rome, the chief
of police, can or cannot tell Mussolini what to do ; the Duce obeys Hm
in regard to routes he takes. There are some streets in Rome he never
travels on. On the other hand, he travels daily from home to office with-
out special guard.

Hitler, the story goes, keeps a small revolver in his desk drawer. Sui-
cide would be understandable with Hitler if his regime collapsed. Not
so the Duce. Mussolini, a compact gorilla, will not perish by such facile
means.

Psychograph

Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, the Viennese psychoanalyst, has madp a fas-
cinating study of Mussolini. His will to power, his intense sense of great
historical mission, may, according to Stekel, derive from bipolar tend-
encies of love and hatred of his father. Mussolini pkre was the first
man of the native village. So young Mussolini became the first man of
Italy. The boy, as a socialist, identified himself with his father; then
differentiating himself, he kicked socialism overboard. The turning-
point of Mussolini’s life was, Stekel believes, his flight from Italy to
Switzerland, which may well have been a flight from paternal mflnpnrp
His father was sent to prison by the local police; now Mussohni sends
father substitutes to prison.

Mussolini must always lead. As a schoolboy he sat at the third table,
the one reserved for the poorest boys ; he has never forgotten this
humiliation. Oimbing mountains, he records that his only pleasure is
getting on top and resting there, the victor of the heights. As a brick-
layer, he wanted always to put the very topmost brick in place. The fact
that he was a mason is of psychological significance, Stekel believes. He
was a builder first of houses, then of the house of Italy.

Throughout his whole life there has been conflict between the jour-
nalist in him and the artist. Like all newspaper men, he wanted to write
novels and *amas. He learned to play the violin.® The men he chiefly
admires, aside from Caesar and Napoleon, are imaginative writers —
Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Petrarch, Pascal. He himself was a failure

* In a vivid interview with George Seldes he explained what music— especially
Italian music— meant to him.

MUSSOLINI

251

as a poet ; therefore he set out to make his life a work of art. He became
a dictator partly because great creative art was denied him.

He has powerful sadistic tendencies; this was shown in his unruly
boyhood.

His life, Stekel says, has been to some extent a regression to child-
hood; he wants to be a stoic, to compensate for juvenile humiliations
and defeats ; he is fascinated by the history of Rome, which was the
youth of his own country. Julius Csesar he thinks was the greatest man
who ever lived. He has identified himself with Caesar closely. (Like
Caesar, a minor but interesting point, he is sensitive to bad weather.)
The only rival to Caesar in his political affections is Napoleon, whom he
always thinks of as an Italian. It is of some significance that his Napo-
leonic play described the Hundred Days: the period when Napoleon,
returning from Elba, flung himself finally against destiny.

Mussolini hates Hitler because he can tolerate no rival dictator. There
must be no second Duce. He has striven not only to check and defeat
Hitler (as in Austria after the Dollfuss murder), but to outdo him.
Hitler left the League of Nations ; but Mussolini, in effect, made war
on it. Hitler asked for colonies, and got none; Mussolini carved one
from Ethiopia.

In Caesar's time, as Mussolini showed Rome in the gigantic new his-
torical tablets he has conspicuously set up near the Forum, Britain was
merely an outpost of the Roman Empire. In the nineteenth century
Britain beat Napoleon, humiliating him at Elba and St. Helena. And in
modern times Britain has sought to transform the Mediterranean, the
Roman sea, Mare Nostrum, into a British lake. It is not entirely fanciful
to think that Mussolini has visions of vindicating C^sar and avenging
Napoleon.

What Fascism Is

When Mussolini took power he had no program except to retain his
job. He admits this candidly. But he quickly found a program, which
derived from a desire to replace the class struggle, which— certainly—
he had done more than most men to intensify, by some sort of class
collaboration. This was the origin of Fascism in practice. The contrast
to Hitler is striking. Hitler came to power with a very definite program,
and soon lost it; Mussolini, devoid of program, quickly invented one.

The outlines of Fascist economy are known to every one. Private prop-
erty, private profits, are preserved, but under strict state control. The

INSIDE EUROPE

252

entire productive capacity of the country, theoretically represented by
employers and employees both, is organized into a series of twenty-two
“corporations, from which deputies to the lower chamber of parliament
are chosen. Representation will be on a basis of occupation instead of
geography; a deputy will represent, say, the hotel business instead of
the province of Turin.

The scheme was put forward cautiously, and expanded very slowly ;
in 1939 it was still an embryo structure. Every corporation contains
three supervising delegates of the Fascist party; each corporation is
headed by a member of the cabinet or an under-secretary, appointed by
Mussolini. The deputies, moreover, are “voted'' into the chamber from
an approved list chosen by the Grand Fascist Council ; electors are privi-
leged simply to say Yes or No to the whole list. Mussolini's two general
“elections" have been grossly dull affairs.

The state, being supreme, regulates economy for its exclusive benefit.
Fascism may be, spiritually, “an attempt to make Romans out of Ital-
ians," but physically it made Italy a prison. “Fascism is a series of ideas
turned into a person," according to Gentile ; and the peculiar person and
character of Mussolini determined the repressive shape it took.

Mussolini told an English publicist late in 1935 that he would find no
orthodox capitalism surviving in Fascist Italy. And in a famous speech
to the National Council of Corporations he announced that the world
economic crisis of 1931-34 had bored so deeply into the capitalist system
that it had become an organic crisis of the system itself. “To-day," he
said, “I declare to you that the capitalist method of production is
finished.”

Indeed one may assemble a seemingly impressive list of anti-capitalist
forces in the corporate state. No employer may discharge labor without
government consent. No capitalist may undertake such comparatively
minor independent activity, as, say, enlarging his factory, without state
approval. Wages are determined by the government ; the employer may
hire labor only at government labor exchanges. A factory owner may
not liquidate his business without state permission; the government
controls his sources of credit; and it takes a large share of his income
in Draconian taxation.

On the other hand, the disadvantages to labor under Fascism are
more severe. Liberty, in a Fascist system, ceases ; the question for the
individual is whether the merits of the regime compensate its loss.
Workers have lost their right to bargain; their trade unions have been

MUSSOLINI

253

dissolved ; they are the weaker party vis-a-vis the employers in the syn-
dicates; they are still subject to the crises of capitalist economy; their
wages may be (and have been) mercilessly deflated by decree; above all,
they have lost the right to strike. The capitalist, on the other hand, even
if he has suffered inconvenience, maintains his fundamental privilege,
that of earning private profits. Fascism as Mussolini introduced it was
not, probably, a deliberate artifice for propping up the capitalist struc-
ture, but it had that effect. The restriction on the mobility of capitalism
was in effect “a premium which the capitalists were willing to pay in
order to get full security against the demands of labor.''

Mussolini, in his essay on Fascism in the Enciclopedia Italiana, begins
by saying how a series of ‘^aphorisms, anticipations and aspirations"
were welded by time into “an ordered expression of doctrine." He
sketches the history of Fascism by describing the things it combated:
(i) Pacifism, (2) Marxian Socialism, (3) Liberal Democracy. He at-
tacks the materialist conception of history: “Fascism, now and always,
believes in holiness and heroism." And as to democracy: “Fascism de-
nies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct
human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a
periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and
fruitful inequality of mankind." “War," he concludes, “alone brings up
to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility
upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it."

His best passage is devoted to Fascism as the totalitarian expression
of the state :

“No doctrine has ever been born completely new, completely defined,
and owing nothing to the past. . . . The foundation of Fascism is its
conception of the state, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism
conceives of the state as an absolute, in comparison with which all indi-
viduals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation
to the state. . . . The state, as conceived of and as created by Fascism,
is a spiritual and moral fact in itself, since political, juridical, and
economic organization of the nation is a concrete thing ; and^ such an
organization must be in its origins and development a manifestation
of the spirit. ...

“The Fascist state is unique, and an original creation. It is not reac-
tionary, but revolutionary, in that it anticipates the solution of the uni-
versal political problems which elsewhere have to be settled in the
political field by the rivalry of parties, the excessive power of the parlia-
mentary regime and the irresponsibility of political assemblies;^ while
it meets the problems of the economic field by a system of syndicalism

INSIDE EUROPE

2S4

which is continually increasing in importance, as much in the sphere
of labor as of industry ; and in the moral field enforces order, discipline,
and obedience to that which is the determined moral code of the country.’^

And he ends the essay by an urgent appeal to imperialism: ‘Tor
Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation,
is an essential manifestation of vitality.”

Chapter XVI

Who Else in Italy?

If I advance, follow me; if I retreat, kill me; if I die, avenge
me.

— Mussolini

There is no revolution that can change the nature of man.

— Mussolini

M ussolini is three things: the Duce (leader) of the Fascist party,
the Capo del Governo, or prime minister, and the head of the
Grand Fascist Council, the highest organ of government in Italy. The
three posts, quite distinct, merge in his person. As Capo del Governo,
he is theoretically responsible to the King; as Duce of the party, he
appoints the Grand Fascist Council and presides over it. The Grand
Fascist Council controls parliament. Hitler, in Germany, has united
party and state; he is Reichsfuhrer. Not so Mussolini, though the effect
is the same. In the U.S.S.R., Stalin, in contrast to Mussolini, is — in
theory — ^appointed by and is responsible to the other members of the
central committee of the communist party, whereas in Italy the members
of the Grand Fascist Council are Mussolini’s underlings. Stalin, how-
ever, like Mussolini, keeps party and state theoretically separate.

The Duce is the only dictator who, so far as is known, has made
arrangements for his succession.^ The Grand Fascist Council numbers
about twenty-five men; its membership, except for ex-officio and life
members, shifts continually and is secret, and it meets in secret. (The
secretary of the party and certain other dignitaries are members so long
as they hold their party or cabinet jobs; the three surviving quadrumvirs
of the March on Rome — Balbo, De Bono, and De Vecchi — ^are life
members.) If Mussolini dies, the Grand Council has the duty of sub-
mitting a list of men from which the King will choose a successor. Three
names are, at present, understood to be on the list, selected in advance —
of course — ^by Mussolini.

^ But in September, 1939, in the emergency of the Polish war, Hitler said that if
anything ‘‘happened” to him Goering would take over, and after that Hess.

255

INSIDE EUROPE

256

Mussolini told Ludwig that there will never be a second Duce; he
meant obviously that there will never be a second Duce like himself. The
men around him are, indeed, small fish. There is no Goering in Italy,
no Kaganovitch. Whenever a subordinate like Grandi or Balbo becomes
too prominent, Mussolini, who doesn’t like the luxury of No. 2 m e n ,
contrives to get rid of him. De Bono was removed from Abyssinia as
soon as he had captured Adowa and Makale. The last secretary of
the party, Achille Starace, held on to his job for a long time, but late
in 1939 he was sacked.

The Duce is the Fascist system; if he dies, can it survive him? The
temptation is to answer in the negative, but one should not forget the
precedent of other countries. Five post-war dictators have died : Lenin,
Ataturk, Dollfuss, Alexander of Jugoslavia, and Pilsudski. In each case
the systems they established— they differed enormously, of course, in
scope and spirit — ^survived.

Dux and Rex

The King, a decent and cautious man, provides assurance of some sort
of continuity— if he wants it— because he still has the right to name the
new prime minister. Mussolini differs from all other dictators in that
he preserved a symbol of permanence above him

Vittorio Emanuele III, born in 1869, is the doyen of European kings,
having reigned almost forty years. He acceded to the throne on the
assassination of his father. His formative years were spent in the army.
He marned a Montenegrin pnncess, Elena. The two great decisions of
his life were the dismissal of Giolittli in 191 5 j which brought Italy
into the War, and his acquiescence to Mussolini’s March on Rome.
He is an enthusiastic numismatist. He is mild, well educated, and, like
almost all Italians, intelligent. His salary is 11,250,000 lire per year, or
roughly $1,000,000. His relations with Mussolini are, contrary to gossip,
quite good.

Nevertheless the little story is told that Vittorio Emanuele greeted
the Abyssinian war with satisfaction.

“If we win,’’ he is reported to have said, “I shall be King of Abys-
sinia. If we lose, I shall be King of Italy.”

The Crown Prince, Umberto Nicola Tomaso Giovanni Maria, Prince
of Piedmont and Heir Apparent, is potentially a character of great im-
portance. This is because the King’s influence, tmder the constitution,
may be decisive in determining the successor to Mussolini. And pre-

WHO ELSE IN ITALY 1

257

sumably old Victor Emmanuel will not be king forever. Umberto may
be on the throne when the crisis that would be entailed by Mussolini’s
death finally comes. For a long time Umberto, an attractive and amia^
ble young man, was somewhat cool to the Fascist regime; lately, how'
ever, he is believed to have become more friendly.

Umberto was born in 1904. He married Princess Maria Jose of
Belgium in 1930. They have two children.

Ciano and Underlings

Count Galeazzo Ciano, born in Leghorn in 1904, has two jobs. First,
he is Mussolini’s son-in-law. Second, he is foreign minister of Italy.
Young Ciano has had a meteoric career to date. He went to law school,
wrote two plays, and dabbled in journalism; then he entered the diplo-
matic service and served first in South America and then China. He
became consul-general in Shanghai, and minister to China. Meantime,
he fell in love with the strong-minded Edda Mussolini, and married her.
On returning to Italy, Ciano became chief of the Italian press depart-
ment — ^where he was extremely popular with the foreign newspaper
men in Rome — ^and then Minister of Press and Propaganda. Came the
Ethiopian war. Ciano entered the air service, and had six months of
fighting. His was the first airplane to land in Addis Ababa after the
Emperor fled. Returning to Rome again, Ciano was promoted to be
foreign minister. Already, it seemed, Mussolini was grooming him for
the succession. He was only 33.

Ciano owed something of his position to his father, Count Constanza
Ciano, who died in 1939. Father Ciano was a distinguished naval officer
during the great war, and for ten years, 1924 to 1934, was Mussolini’s
minister of communications. It was part of his responsibility to see that
Italian trains — early Fascist feat! — ^ran on time. Mussolini later pro-
moted him to be President of Chamber of Deputies. Until the startling
rise of his son, the elder Ciano was supposed to have been a possible
successor of the Duce.

It goes without saying that Edda Mussolini has had great influence
on young Ciano’s career and character. An ambitious and colorful person
herself, she had — ^and has — colorful ambitions for her husband also.
Edda is Mussolini’s darling of darlings. Naturally Ciano entered closely
not merely into the family circle, but into the heart of politics. Musso-
lini likes him better than any man in Italy.

Edda had a great deal to do — ^more than had Ciano himself possibly

INSIDE EUROPE

258

— ^with the evolution of the Rome-Berlin axis. She liked Germany, and
was liked there, especially by the Goermgs, who named their daughter
for her. When Ciano signed the first German accord in 1936, which
created the axis, he was quoted in a remarkable interview with the
New York Times as follows: "'My pet plan — a close tie-up with Ger-
many, has become a reality.'’ But when the 1939 crisis came Ciano was
bitterly disillusioned. Both Hitler and Ribbentrop treated him badly.
The axis began to creak.

Mussolini did not want to fight over Danzig. He — and Ciano — ^knew
that neutrality was the only possible policy for Italy. They disguised
""neutrality" with the phrase ""non-belligerence."

Ciano's friends, on one occasion, were somewhat shocked at his light-
hearted description of the modern technique of massacre. Interviewed
after one of his bombing exploits in Ethiopia, young Ciano was reported
to have said:

“When you see a concentration of Ethiopian troops, you give them
a few rounds with a machine-gun and they scatter and hide in the long
grass. Then, when you fire a few more rounds at random, each of them
thinks the bullets are falling near him, and they promptly emerge and
run in all directions, when you can pop them oif in real earnest."

(London Evening Nems^ October 17, 1935.)

Young Ciano did not have an easy time as foreign minister. Spain
was exploding, the Mediterranean crisis intervened, and his relations
with Britain continued to be troublesome. It seemed that Neville Cham-
berlain, following an Anglo-Italian ""Gentleman's Agreement," did every-
thing possible to conciliate Mussolini, but without much success. But
when war came he still held his job, and late in 1939 a cabinet reshuffle
strengthened his position.

The job of the secretary of the Fascist party is to make the mistakes.
Mussolini gives the party secretary all the inside work to do ; when he has
made himself sufficiently unpopular by exerting discipline, refusing pro-
motions, picking out men for jobs, and so on, he is dismissed and re-
placed by some one else. Since 1919, when the party was organized, there
have been seven secretaries ; in other words it takes an average of three
years for one to outlive his usefulness. Bianchi, one of the quadrumvirs,
the first secretary, was involved in the Matteotti business, and Mussolini
dropped him. His successor, Giunta, was one of d’Annunzio's legion-

WHO ELSE IN ITALY? 259

naires in the attack on Fiume. The next was Roberto Farinacci, boss of
Cremona; he was too violent even for the Duce and to-day he is an
almost forgotten figure. Next came Augusto Turati, a more capable
and respectable man, who managed to hold the job for four years ; he is
now, however, in internment on the island of Rhodes. Following him
was Giurati; he was the author of the Fascist Ten Commandments.
Then came Achille Starace, who was followed in turn by Ettore Muti.

It happens that Starace has exophthalmic eyes, somewhat like Musso-
lini ^s, and he was accused of slavish physical imitation of his master when
his eyes popped and rolled. A minor victim of megalomania, within safe
bounds, he maintained an imposing office, and was supposed to exercise
his fingers with a mechanical device in order to strengthen his hand-
shake. Starace is still head of the ^^Dopolavoro^^ movement which is an
effort to supervise Fascist leisure as well as working hours. His job
made him unpopular ; his honesty was, however, admitted. Starace made
one amusing blunder once, his announcement that letter writers should
say Evviva II Duce in their correspondence. The next day one of Musso-
lini’s typical anonymous and scornful editorials in the Popolo dPtcdia
repudiated the idea; he didn’t want to copy the Heil Hitler of Nazi
Germany.

Another comparatively powerful subordinate was Edmondo Rossoni,
under-secretary to the Duce in his capacity of Capo del Governo, who
spent many years in America as a labor organizer. Rossoni was the man
who built up Mussolini’s labor syndicates. He lost his job, however,
in the 1939 shakeup.

Balbo

Italo Balbo, a vivacious and accomplished ruffian, reputedly the in-
ventor of the castor-oil treatment for recalcitrant non-Fascists, ‘*a Fascist
from the first hour” and Mussolini’s whilom “right hand,” was still exiled
in Lybia in 1939, of which province he was governor. He was given
no part in the Abyssinian campaign, of which, it is believed, he (like the
general staff) at first strongly disapproved. Balbo was packed off to
Lybia in June, 1933, after his dramatic and successful flight to Chicago
from Rome. His name may not be mentioned in an Italiaij paper more
than once a month.

The story was that Mussolini exiled Balbo first because his spectacu-
lar success in aviation had made him too popular, second because he had
been accused of using his position to enrich himself. But another and

26 o

INSIDE EUROPE

more important reason was apparently Balbo’s close friendship with
Umberto, the Crown Prince. In 1932 and 1933 Umberto had anti-
Fascist leanings ; grimly Mussolini changed the army oath of allegiance,
cutting out the reference to the King’s ‘Voyal successor.” The report
was heard that the Duke of Aosta, a great favorite with the regime,
and now Viceroy in Abyssinia, might displace Umberto as heir-apparent.
Balbo at the time was Umberto’s ‘"man.” Now, most of those well
informed think, the King has prevailed upon Umberto to see the foolish-
ness of his ways. But Balbo is still very close to Umberto ; every once
in a while he flies from Lybia to Naples, where the Crown Prince lives,
and conspicuously stays in the palace for a day or two.

Balbo is the only man in Fascist Italy who even now, within limita-
tions, does what he pleases. Once, when he was air minister, the Duce
disapproved of his aviation budget; Balbo, arriving in the Palazzo
Venezia, saw that the usual chair next to Mussolini’s desk was missing,
while his master remained seated. This meant that Balbo was being dis-
ciplined like a schoolboy ; he would have to talk standing up. So promptly
he sat down — on Mussolini’s desk.

Tall, copper-bearded, a picturesque as well as arrogant figure, Balbo
was bom in Ferrara, near Bologna, in 1897. He enlisted in the army as
a boy, and won decorations in his teens; he founded a newspaper at
twenty; he took part in the D’Annunzio adventure and was among the
first to join Mussolini in 1919. In the braggadocio days, he was con-
spicuous among the bludgeoners ; he captured Ravenna from the social-
ists, besieged Parma, and for a time was expelled from the party for
•‘systematic clubbing.” At the age of twenty-six he was first commander
of the Fascist militia; then he became under-secretary of national
economy, finally secretary for air. Before his flight to Chicago he had
organized and led similar formation flights to Odessa, around the Medi-
terranean, and to Brazil.

Balbo is quoted in Finer with a passage which strikingly shows the
similarity between the early Fascists and their subsequent analogues in
Germany:

“When I returned from the war — ^just like so many others — I hated
politics and tne politicians, who in my opinion had betrayed the hopes
of the soldiers, reducing Italy to a shameful peace and the cult of heroes.
To struggle, to fight in order to return to the land of Giolitti, who
made a merchandise of every ideal ? No. Rather deny everything, destroy
everything, in order to renew everything from the foundations.”

WHO ELSE IN ITALY? 261

Marshal Emilio de Bono, another of the quadrumvirs, was the first
commander-in-chief of the Italian forces in Abyssinia. Bom in 1866, a
generation older than Balbo, he had a long career as a regular army
officer; he was the commander of Mussolini’s regiment in the war.
Disgusted at the ‘‘collapse” of Italy in 1919 and 1920, he resigned his
command of the army corps at Verona and joined the Fascist move-
ment. An amateur musician, he wrote the first marching song of the
Black Shirts. He was, like so many of Mussolini’s close associates,
allegedly implicated in the Matteotti murder. He was governor of Tripoli
for a time, then minister of colonies.

The Other Warriors

In November, 1935, Mussolini replaced De Bono in Abyssinia by
Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Italy’s most distinguished soldier. The reasons
for the shift were several. For one thing, De Bono had done his job,
even though the campaign was going slowly. For another, appointment
of Badoglio made the business an affair squarely of the regular army,
not merely of the Black Shirts. Cleverly the Duce saddled Badoglio
with responsibility for making the war succeed. It certainly succeeded,
and Badoglio became first Viceroy of Ethiopia and Duke of Addis
Ababa.

Marshal Badoglio had a brilliant military career. He was born in
1875, 2tnd joined the artillery in 1890; he has fought in every Italian war
since, and was one of the survivors of Adowa in 1896; he has been
decorated for bravery seven times. After the Great War he was vari-
ously a senator, ambassador to Brazil, chief of the general staff, and
president of the army council. He could have crushed the March on
Rome had the King given assent. It is generally believed that at the
beginning he opposed the Abyssinian war; the general staff prepared a
report on the possibilities of the campaign which Mussolini, it is said,
tore up in rage. But Mussolini was right ; they were wrong.

General Rudolfo Graziani, at first the leader of the Somaliland forces,
knew Africa well ; he spent seven years as junior officer in Eritrea, and
from 1926 to 1930 he was the “pacifier” of Cyrenaica. He succeeded
Badoglio in the supreme Abyssinian command. Military experts call
him Italy’s best officer. In 1937 came an attempt on his life in Addis
Ababa ; a massacre of Ethiopians followed. He is now the Italian chief
of staff, and a highly able one.

262

INSIDE EUROPE

Diplomats

For a time the Duce’s favorite for work in foreign affairs was Dino
Grandi, but at the Lausanne reparations conference the French and
British composed an agreement excluding Italy, and Grandi was pun-
ished by being sent to London as ambassador — there, presumably, to
learn better the manners of the subtle British. Mussolini was supposed
to have been furious at him in the summer of 1935, because Grandi had
not warned him that the British would take the lead in imposing sanc-
tions against Italy. But many besides Grandi were deceived. Grandi, once
a squadristi leader, has long since lived down his salad days. He is con-
nected with the Corima company of Genoa, which recovered the gold
from the submerged liner Egypt, one of the most remarkable of modern
marine exploits. A man of great personal charm, he was probably the
most popular of the ambassadors at the Court of St. James’s. He left
London in 1938, and is now minister of justice.

Grandi may still have a great career, because he represents modera-
tion, and he is extremely well-liked abroad. Both Grandi and Balbo are
believed to have disliked the axis policy invented and followed by
Ciano ; both, moreover, disliked heartily the new — and totally un-Italian
— ^policy of anti-Semitism which Mussolini and Ciano, slavishly Imitating
the Germans,^ adopted in 1938. Italy took more and more drastic action
against the Jews. They were excluded from state schools, they were
barred from the stock exchange and government jobs, they were for-
bidden to marry ^'pure” Italians. Grandi, it is believed, opposed all this.
A Fascist (an Italian Fascist) from the earliest days, he was born in
1895 -

Baron Pompeo Aloisi, the man who represented Mussolini at Geneva,
did well with a stiff and ticklish job ; he had to maintain a modicum of
self-respect and persuade others of the independence of his judgment
while he was, in the strenuous days of October, 1935, merely the Duce’s
mouthpiece. His ferocious master raged in the Palazzo Venezia ; at the
Council table in Geneva Aloisi had to give the impression of steadiness
and poise. Mussolini gave him impossible orders like the injunction to

® For instance the Italian army adopted the goose-step, conveniently renamed the
passo Romano.

WHO ELSE IN ITALY? 263

accuse the Abyssinians of “aggression/’ which he had to present plaus-
ibly and with a straight face.

Born of a noble Roman family in 1875, Aloisi began life as a naval
officer, then turned to the diplomatic service. He had wide experience;
in 1919, far from the squadristi in Tuscany and the Emilia, he was Press
officer of the Italian delegation at the Pans peace conference. He was a
diplomate de carriere, one of the few whom Mussolini retained, and he
served as minister or ambassador in Copenhagen, Tirana, Bucharest,
Ankara, and Tokio. He was the agent of Mussolini’s penetration of Al-
bania; in Japan, a cultivated man, he found time to write a book on Jap-
anese art. The Duce sent him to the League in 1932. He worked well as
chairman of the League committee organizing the Saar plebiscite.

The former under-secretary for foreign affairs, Fulvio Suvitch, well
known for his foppish clothes, was born in Trieste, then part of Austria.
During the war he crossed the lines from the Austrian to the Italian
army. He is of no consequence nowadays in execution of policy; in 1936
he was named ambassador to the United States.

Jesters do oft Prove Prophet/'

“There is a widespread belief,” wrote the Manchester Guardian re-
cently, “that dictators are iron-souled and thick-skinned ; the truth is that
they are the most sensitive creatures in the world. ... It is the leaders
of the democracies who are tough and wiry. They can stand criticism,
and either bear it in good part or put up with it. Not so the dictator ; an
unfriendly remark or even good-humored banter is so intolerable that
the very sinews of the state are felt to shake dangerously in response to
the jangled nerves of the dictator.”

Jokes in the U.S.S.R., as we shall see, mostly deal with the rights of
the Five-Year plan ; German jokes are based most often on the terror ;
jokes in Italy perhaps significantly — ^aside from those international jokes
which are applied indiscriminately to all the dictators — deal mostly with
corruption. Mussolini himself is above any whisper of financial irregu-
larity, but if the current of suppressed laughter in Italy is any indication,
the rank and file Fascists think poorly of the integrity and petty bosses
and sub-leaders. The party, of course, controls all the best jobs ; on this
fact the wits flourish.

Most Italian jokes hinge on the word mangiare, which means two
things, “to eat” and “to graft.”

Little Romano Mussolini, for instance, says to the Duce at the dinner-

INSIDE EUROPE

264

table, ‘'Father, what must I do to become a great man like yourself?"*
Mussolini answers, ''Mangi e taci’' (Eat and be quiet).

The most Fascist of animals is the elephant ; because it first makes the
Fascist salute — and then eats. The Fascist insignia have been placed on
all locomotives — ^because they "eat up** the road. Mount Vesuvius was
recently given an honorary degree, because it opened its mouth — ^to eat.
A traveler stops a policeman, "Where can I eat well in this town?**
Reply: "At the party headquarters.**

Another type of story goes like this. At a congress of veteran Fascists
some one called out, "To whom does Italy belong^** Chorus : NOI!'^

(to us). "To whom belongs victory?** Chorus: "To whom

the Duce?** Chorus: NOI '*■* Then a voice interrupts : "To whom be-

longs work?** (A chi il lavoro?) The chorus stops in embarrassment,
then begins to sing the Fascist anthem, Giovinesm,

No street has ever been named for Mussolini. This is because the
word via means not only street, but "away.**

The New Pope

On March 2, 1939, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the Papal Secretary of
State, succeeded the venerable Pius XI as Pope Thus a distinguished
son of the Church reached its supreme office The new Pope — ^to empha-
size the association of his ideas with those of his predecessor — assumed
the name Pius XII. As such, he instantly became a dominant force in
world affairs.

From many points of view the election of Pius XII on that day, March
2, was striking. For one thing — ^an odd and attractive detail — ^the day
was the new Pope*s birthday. The conclave was the shortest in history,
lasting only one day, and Cardinal Pacelli was chosen after only three
ballots. On the first he got 30 votes from the 62 cardinals present, on the
second 40. The third ballot was 61 to i. Everyone voted for the new
Pope except himself. He, it is believed, cast his vote for Cardinal Granato
di Belmonte, the Dean of the Sacred College When the vote was taken,
the new Pope buried his face. He muttered, "I accept because in this I
see the will of God. I commend myself to the mercy of God.**

The elevation of Cardinal Pacelli was notable for other reasons. He
was the first Papal Secretary of State to become Pope in 271 years, and
the first Camerlengo (Papal Chamberlain) ever to attain this eminence.
Not for generations had a man reached the Papacy who never, in his
career, had any purely pastoral duties. He was the first Roman noble-

WHO ELSE IN ITALY? 265

man to become Supreme Pontiff for more than a century. He was a man
of the modern world — one who sometimes typewrote his own letters,
who used an electric razor, who had traveled widely. Above all, he was
representative of a profession — diplomacy. His life for forty years had
been consecrated to statecraft as well as religion. The pressure of events
plus his superb brain and character trained him for his papacy.

The gaunt, lean- jawed Pontiff, with his extraordinarily beautiful eyes
and hands, is scholar, linguist, traveler, diplomat, statesman. He is be-
yond doubt the best educated Pope of modern times. Among other things
he speaks nine languages.

The new Pope was born in Rome in 1876, of a distinguished Roman
aristocratic family. His father was Dean of the College of Consistorial
Advocates. Sons of the family had traditionally been lawyers closely as-
sociated with religious affairs ; Francesco Pacelli, the Pope^s brother, is
in fact one of the Vatican’s lawyers, who played an important role in
drawing up the Lateran treaty. The Pope has two sisters, Elisabetta and
Giuseppina. On his elevation to the Holy Seat, almost the first thing he
did was to telephone them. He has a very strong sense of duty and devo-
tion in personal as well as ecclesiastical life.

Young Pacelli decided to become a priest instead of going into the
law, and in 1899, at the age of 23, he was ordained. He was a sensitive
and accomplished lad, with a fine scholastic record. Entering the Vatican
service, he was appointed to the Congregation of Extraordinary Ec-
clesiastical AfEairs, which is a division of the Papal Secretariat of State,
or foreign office. Here his chief was Cardinal Gasparri, under whose
benevolent influence he worked for many years. Gasparri saw that this
young Father would go far; he taught and trained him well. In 1917
came a turning point in his life. Heretofore he had been, as it were, a
brilliant civil servant within the Vatican walls. Now he entered the world
outside, as a diplomat, a negotiator. He had been an assistant secretary
of state ; he became now an ambassador abroad.

This was the first result of his appointment, in 1917, as Apostolic
Nuncio to Munich. He was elevated at the same time to the rank of
Archbishop. It was he who presented the peace plan of Benedict XV to
the Kaiser, but the Kaiser would not listen. The Archbishop Nuncio re-
mained in Germanv for twelve years, first in Munich, then in Berlin.
This experience of Germany is, it goes without saying, of inestimable im-
portance to him now. He saw the breakdown of Germany after the war;
he saw the struggling Weimar republic at first hand ; he watched the rise

266

INSIDE EUROPE

of Hitler. Once, in Munich, some communist desperadoes entered his
house, intending to murder him; he persuaded them calmly, without
lifting his voice, to go away. During his twelve years of Germany he ne-
gotiated two concordats, one with Bavaria, one with the Reich as a
whole.

Archbishop Pacelli was recalled to Rome in 1929, promoted to be a
Cardinal, and soon appointed to the Secretaryship of State in succession
to Gasparri. So he became the foreign minister of the Vatican, watching
the interests of 330,000,000 Catholics in every country of the globe. The
political experience which the Cardinal accrued in those years was tre-
mendous. During all the turbulent 30’s, he directed Vatican foreign
policy. He traveled often : to France, to South America, and in 1936 to
the United States. During his American visit he flew 8,000 miles across
the country and back, to see our natural and political wonders ; he in-
spected Boulder Dam and lunched with President Roosevelt.

The new Pope’s dominant characteristics — ^grace, dignity, and saintli-
ness aside — ^are an acute sense of political realities and great skill and
subtlety in negotiation. In Berlin, in the old days when he was Nuncio,
he was universally admired and liked. But his fellow cardinals chose him
as Supreme Father not merely because he is one of the most attractive of
contemporary historical figures. They chose him for his experience and
ability. He was their answer to the disastrous political situation in the
world, to the upheavals that were bound to come in the uncharted future,
and above all to the threat to Catholicism that war would bring. They
wanted a man who knew.

The new Pontiff lives, it goes without saying, a life of extreme sim-
plicity. He rises at six, works hard all morning, and for his only relaxa-
tion walks after luncheon in the Vatican gardens. He receives a great
many people, working into the night, and makes decisions himself on an
infinity of matters. He is dependent on no one to the extent that Pius
XI — ^who ardently wished him to be his successor — ^was dependent on
him. Yet his austerity, his simplicity, do not deprive him of human qual-
ities. The Pope can smile ; the Pope can weep too.

Immediately war broke out, six short months after he became Pontiff,
the responsibilities of Pope Pius XII naturally became more onerous.
Germany had already seized one Roman Catholic country — ^Austria.
Promptly it proceeded to seize another — Poland. And the Germans were
uneasy at his elevation to the papacy; they called him a ‘'political” pope.
From the beginning he took a strong line against totalitarianism. He felt

WHO ELSE IN ITALY*?

267

that both Naziism and Bolshevism were enemies to Christianity, and he
deplored the doctrine of racism as it became interjected into Italian Fas-
cism. In one of his early speeches, he talked of “the defense of the Chris-
tian heritage against the enemies of God.’’

The new Pope’s first Encyclical, of date October 28, 1939, was a pow-
erful condemnation of racism, treaty breaking and totalitarian ag-
gression.

Gapter XVll

War in Abyssinia

Our future lies to the east and south, in Asia and Africa,

— Mussolini

Statesmen only talk of fate when they have blundered.

— Mussolini

If it wasn't for myopia,
We could see to Ethiopia,

I N OCTOBER, 193s, the campaign against Abyssinia began. Musso-
lini, cold-blooded as only an Italian can be, set out, 'hn violation of
covenants he was pledged to support, to rob and conquer a country he
had promised to defend.”

For years he had threatened a push to the east. The campaign should
have surprised nobody. He had cast hungry eyes at Tunis ; an arrange-
ment between Soviet Russia and Turkey prevented an adventure some
years ago in Anatolia. He needed room — colonies— -for Italy to expand
in. But his habit of bluster had, lamentably enough, persuaded folk in
Western Europe that he was bluffing. Why did he choose 1935 as the
time for the adventure he had long foretold? And why, as proof that
his bite was worse than his bark, did he pick Abyssinia?

One must pause a moment to describe Italy’s fundamental realities,
Mussolini or no Mussolini, in economies.

Italy has forty-two million people, as many as France, crowded into
one-third the arable land of France. The population increases by the
astounding total of four hundred and fifty thousand births per year. *We
are hungry for land,” Mussolini himself put it, “because we are prolific,
and intend to remain so.” Of the forty-two million Italians, overwhelm-
ingly the largest proportion are engaged in agriculture; the country is
only ten per cent industrial. No less than twenty-one per cent of the
population is illiterate. The country cardinally lacks raw materials ; it has
no rubber, tin, nickel, tungsten, mica or chromium; it is dependent on
imports from abroad for ninety-nine per cent of its cotton, eight per cent

268

WAR IN ABYSSINIA 269

of its wool, ninety-five per cent of its coal, ninety-nine per cent of its
mineral oil, eighty per cent of its iron and steel, ninety-nine per cent of
its copper. Despite Mussolini's ‘‘battle of the grain," it does not produce
enough food for its own requirements ; it must import fifteen per cent of
its meat, and twenty per cent of its grain. Finally, Japan excepted, Italy
has the most exposed coastline of any important country in the world.

Mussolini's job in the first years of Fascism was, in general terms, an
attempt to transform a country so meagerly favored by nature into a
great power. He succeeded, but at a frightful cost. Taxation increased
till it ate up no less than thirty-eight per cent of the total national in-
come. The trade balance remained monstrously adverse. The budget defi-
cit increased from a modest $55,000,000 in 1930-31 to $300,000,000 in
1932-33, and $535,000,000 in 1933-34, which was twenty-five per cent
of the total national income. The preparations for the Abyssinian cam-
paign, before the war began, cost 200,000,000 lire, or roughly $165,000,-
000. The Italian gold reserve was halved ; Mussolini, who had sworn to
defend the lire to the “last drop" of his blood, was forced in effect to
leave the gold standard. The war itself cost an incalculable sum.

Now it is quite true, as H. R. Knickerbocker and Dorothy Thompson
have pointed out, that under dictatorships the economic laws which apply
in democratic countries may be simply suspended. Hitler or Mussolini
can do tricks with money that are impossible under orthodox latsses-jaire
capitalism. Economics under Hitler and Mussolini became purely a
political question; the only issue was how long the people would bear
the merciless strain of dictatorial manipulation. Even so, the internal
situation of Italy, toward the end of 1934, and the beginning of 1935,
contributed to make an “external diversion," so popular among dictators,
necessary. The very reasons why he should not have made war were
those why Mussolini did. “It was not a question of whether he could
afford to fight, but whether he could afford not to."

I do not think, however, that Mussolini (who like Hitler is not much
interested in economics) was prompted to war exclusively by economic
factors. They were immensely buttressed by politico-nationalist con-
siderations.^ Mussolini is not the man who thinks of countries or
frontiers predominantly as functions of economic stresses. His mind
much more directly seized on territory as a symbol of political prestige.
One should never forget the secret treaty of London, which tempted
Italy to break the Triple Alliance and enter the War on the side of

^ Nationalism is, of course, partly an economic phenomenon.

INSIDE EUROPE

270

the Allies. By that treaty Italy was promised more spoils of victory than
it got ; Italy was shockingly let down.

Mussolini’s foreign policy was, on the whole, a failure. He stood in
a contradictory position ; Italy, one of the victor powers, wanted treaty
revision just the same. The French blocked him off from Tunis; his
penetration of Albania was costly and not very lucrative experiment;
his Four-Power Pact, an attempt to form a sort of twentieth-century
Holy Alliance on quasi-revisionist grounds, was stillborn; he tried to
keep the Balkan pot boiling, and was defeated by a Balkan Pact virtually
uniting Jugoslavia, Rumania, Turkey, and Greece against him; finally,
Hitler took Austria, which seriously compromised his prestige m Central
Europe.

But politics alone might not have sufficed to cause the Abyssinian war.
The climate of Fascism is strenuous. Like all dictators, Mussolini was
"a prisoner of prestige.” He had to keep on doing something. Hitler
was stealing far too much space from him in world headlines. He was
personally a warrior and imperialist; he talked of ''imperialism as the
eternal and immutable law of life.” Every rational or objective considera-
tion told Mussolini, a strikingly intelligent man, that the Abyssinian
war was a difficult and dangerous business. It had long been a truism
in European politics that Italy was permanently condemned to depend-
ence on Great Britain, because of its exposed coastline and the control of
the Mediterranean by the British fleet. Mussolini flouted this truism. An
interesting example of the importance of personality, perhaps of megalo-
mania, in politics. The Duce was not alarmed by the pessimistic reports
of the geologists in Abyssinia. He knew what its chief crop was — ^glory.

*'Upon What Meat Has This Our Caesar Fed^'^

Mussolini himself would lift an eyebrow at it, but parenthetically
one should quote the following manifesto by the well-known Italian
futurist, F. T. Marinetti, called "War Has a Beauty of Its Own” :

1. Because it fuses strength and kindness. Strength alone tends to
cruelty and kindness to debility, but the two together "generate soli-
darity and generosity.”

2. Because it assures the supremacy of mechanized man, equipped
with gas-masks, megaphones, flame-throwers, and tanks, over his ma-
chines.

3. Because it begins the long-dreamed-of "metalization” of man.

4. Because it completes the beauty of a flowery meadow with its
machine-guns, "passionate orchids.”

WAR IN ABYSSINIA

271

5. Because when the symphony of rifle fire and artillery bombard-
ment stops, the songs of soldiers can be heard and the perfumes and
odors of putrefaction can be perceived.

6. Because it ‘‘genially remolds terrestrial scenery” with its inspired
artillery.

7. Because it creates new architecture, such as the heavy tank.

8 Because it exceeds m violence the battles of the angels and the
devils.

9. Because it definitely cures man of individual fear and collective
panic, with a refined and stylized heroism.

10. Because it rejuvenates the male body and renders the female one
more desirable.

11. War has a beauty of its own because it “serves towards the
aggrandizement of the great Fascist Italy.”

{Manchester Guardian, November 15, 1935.)

Another factor was that intangible and elastic concept known as
national “honor.” The same factor, we have seen, helped bring Hitler
power in Germany. Italians, despite Mussolini, still smarted under the
humiliation of Adowa where the Abyssinians had massacred them in
1896, and of Caporetto, where the Austro-German army had broken
through in the worst defeat suffered by a western power in the Great
War. Mussolini, like Hitler, was avenging an earlier degradation, re-
turning to Italy, as on a bloody salver, its self-respect.

The Dogs oj War

Why did Mussolini choose Abyssinia? For the simplest of reasons,
that Italy grew up too late to join the other imperialist powers picking
colonial fruit, and Abyssinia was the only territory left. Why had
Abyssinia been spared the colonial “attentions” of Great Britain and
France? Because it was a country where settlement by Europeans was
costly, where the wealth of natural resources was dubious, and where,
above all, peculiarly impregnable warrior tribes made military conquest
difficult. Dislike of the Italian campaign should not make anyone think
that the Abyssinians are a gentle or charming people.

As to difficulties of settlement, the following excerpts from an article
in the Nm Republic (August 7, 1935), are illuminating:

“An Italian settler going to Ethiopia to engage in farming would
need to take with him complete supplies, including building materials
for his home. Ethiopia could not serve as an outlet for Italy’s surplus
population unless the government heavily subsidized each emigrant.
For about forty years, Italy has made sporadic attempts to colonize

INSIDE EUROPE

272

Eritrea, which, in the uplands, resembles much of Ethiopia. The present
European population of Eritrea is 4,565, most of whom are government
officials. ...

^There is another drawback to mass emigration to Ethiopia — ^with
an estimated native population of ten million. Many natives develop
into highly skillful workmen, as has been demonstrated on two Belgian
coffee plantations already established there. . . . Throughout Africa, the
individual white farmer, depending on his own labor, has never succeeded
in competing with the native worker under white management. An Italian
peasant farmer in Ethiopia would either drop to the native standard of
living or starve to death.

"Tn attempting to use Ethiopia as a source of raw materials, Italy will
be confronted with its obdurate geography. ... For years adventurous
white men have prospected in Ethiopia and tried to interest European
capital in their supposed discoveries. None of them^ has yet told a story
convincing enough to obtain backing. . . **

But Abyssinia’s “obdurate” geography did not prevent the great
powers from the usual imperialist aggressions. As far back as 1891 and
1894, Britain and Italy set up “spheres of influence” in Abyssinia; that
of Italy was not very valuable, but the British sphere included the Lake
Tsana region, from which flow the headwaters of the Blue Nile, which
irrigates the Sudan and Egypt. In 1906, although Abyssinia’s inde-
pendence was recognized by Italy, a Tripartite agreement formally par-
titioned the country into French, British, and Italian spheres ; this was
a typical pre-war imperialist treaty. Abyssinia protested against it, but
no one paid attention.

In 1915 the secret treaty of London, mentioned above, provided that
“in the event of France and Great Britain increasing their colonial ter-
ritories in Africa at the expense of Germany, those two powers agree
in principle that Italy may claim some equitable compensation, particu-
larly as regards the settlement in her favor of the questions relating to
the frontiers of the Italian colonies of Eritrea, Somaliland, and Lybia.”

Abyssinia entered the League of Nations in 1923, with France and
Italy as her godmothers. Italy was particularly eager to press Abys-
sinian membership, in order to forestall suspected encroachments in
Ethiopia by Great Britain. This was a mistake of Mussolini’s. Anyone
who tries to hoodwink the British suffers for it — ^in the long run. Had
not Abyssinia been a member of the League, the British could not have
mobilized world opinion to harass Italy in the 1935-6 war.

* Except Francis W. Rickett, whose Standard Oil concession of August 31, 1935,
was quickly shelved.

WAR IN ABYSSINIA 273

In 1925 Sir Austen Chamberlain and Mussolini negotiated an agree-
ment confirming their respective spheres of influence in Abyssinia. Re-
ferring to this document, Mussolini angrily stated in September, 1935,
that ‘‘it divided — ^you understand me — ^virtually cut up Abyssinia.’' The
British wanted to build a dam near Lake Tsana. In return for Italian
approval and support, they promised “to recognize an exclusive Italian
economic influence in the west of Abyssinia” and to support an Italian
project for a railway through Abyssinia connecting Eritrea and Somali-
land. But Abyssinia was a member of the League in 1925 and the
Emperor Haile Selassie (then the Regent) protested so vigorously at
Geneva that the agreement lapsed.

In 1928 Italy signed a treaty of “friendship, conciliation, and arbi-
tration” with Abyssinia. In Article Two, each government pledged itself
“not to take any action detrimental to the independence of the other.”
Then seven years passed, until Mussolini struck

The initial incident, that of Walwal on December 5, 1934, was called
a “frontier” squabble, but in reality, as even Italian maps showed at the
time (they have been hurriedly changed), Walwal is about a hundred
miles from the Somaliland border, well inside Abyssinian territory. The
fight began when a joint Anglo-Abyssinian frontier commission discov-
ered an Italian military detachment camped at Walwal. The British
retired; the Abyssinians fought Thirty-two Italians, one hundred and
ten Abyssinians were killed. This was probably the pretext Mussolini
was waiting for ; at any rate a flaming ultimatum, in the Corfu manner,
descended on Addis Ababa; the Duce demanded that the Abyssinians
apologize, salute the Italian flag, and pay $100,000 indemnity.

What happened thereafter is well known. The British Empire began
to move.

Albion Perfidef

Mussolini must have assumed that Great Britain would not object
to his adventure. Otherwise it is doubtful if even the Duce would have
launched it. At any rate he accuses the British of having seriously misled
him. On January 29, 1935, he sent Signor Grandi to the Foreign Office,
“inviting the British Government to consider specific agreements for a
harmonious development of the Italian and British interests in Ethiopia.”
He was, he said, willing to “table his case.” The British answered
“evasively.” The Foreign Office did not, apparently, look with favor on

INSIDE EUROPE

274

the Duce’s proposal ; on the other hand it seems to have given no very
definite warning of opposition.

When It became clear that Britain was opposing him and lending the
immense weight of its influence to the League, Mussolini began to storm
and bluster. He snarled at one interviewer that he was ‘‘not a collector
of deserts,”^ when the Committee of Five proposed minor territorial
adjustments. He threatened to leave the League “at once'" if sanctions
against Italy were applied ; and subsequently did so. While Eden, Laval,
and Aloisi put their heads together in Paris, he mounted a howitzer
shouting encouragement to his Black Shirts, saying that he would go
forward “with Geneva, without Geneva, or against Geneva." Sir Samuel
Hoare made a historic speech to the League assembly, pledging Britain
to “collective maintenance of the Covenant in its entirety, and particu-
larly for steady and collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked
aggression."

Mussolini’s reply to this was twofold. First, he proceeded with the
war, and on October 3 invaded Abyssinia, One of his rare hypocrisies,
he claimed that Haile Selassie was the aggressor, who, as Vernon Bart-
lett ironically put it, “by ordering withdrawal of his own troops in his
own territory, had committed a provocative act." Second, he issued a
series of tumultuous statements and interviews which were perhaps
justifiably plaintive in tone.

“We are on the march," he told the Morning Post, “It is too late now
to tell us to stop. . . . Look at Portugal, and Belgium, and Holland.
They all have fruitful colonies. Surely Italy must have fruitful colonies
too. As soon as we get such colonies, Italy will become conservative,
like all colonial powers. . . .” To the New York Sun he complained:
“Why are we condemned for what you yourselves do whenever the
need arises? You never hesitated about war when your interests were
involved. Think about Mexico and Cuba and your own civil war be-
tween North and South. How did the United States end slavery?" He
said in one speech, “The wheel of destiny moves towards a goal — the
rhythm has become faster and cannot now be stopped. An attempt is
being made to commit the blackest injustice against Italians, that of
refusing them a little place in the sun. Until it is proved to the contrary,
I refuse to believe that the people of Great Britain wish to shed their

® He told Ward Price of the Daily Mail, “I got 110,000 square miles of Saharan
desert from the French a little while ago. Do you know how many inhabitants
there are in that desolate area? Sixty-two I"

WAR IN ABYSSINIA 275

blood and to drive Europe towards catastrophe to defend a barbarous
country unworthy of ranking among civilized peoples.”

He foamed with rage at England. Britain, he did not need to point
out, while sitting on roughly one-quarter of the world, while dominating
an empire of 450,000,000 people (384,000,000 of whom represent colored
races), was frustrating his tiny adventure, a colonial adventure of the
kind that Britain had herself so many times indulged in. It was no use
trying to explain to him that the British Empire was built up before
the war, that the Covenant of the League of Nations put a different face
on the piracy of new territory. Britain had fought the Boer war. Britain
suppressed the 350,000,000 people of India. Britain had not stopped
Japan in Manchuria, Mussolini raged.

And indeed others than Mussolini were able to assemble a list of Brit-
ish imperialist adventures.

From 1788 till 1925 Great Britain fought, it was calculated, approxi-
mately twenty campaigns or wars to keep the route to India open.^ The
British fought Napoleon on the Nile, at Trafalgar, at Aboukir, and
indirectly in Copenhagen, which they wantonly bombarded. The British
intrigued in Eg3rpt, annexed Aden, invaded Abyssinia, penetrated Persia,
and joined the Turks against Russia in the Crimean War The British
acquired Cyprus, extended their control of Egypt, advanced into the
Sudan, and fought the Great War to prevent the German Drang nach
Osten,

In October the French newspaper Gringoire, an organ of the Right,
published an article entitled “Should England Be Reduced to Slavery ?”
Its unamiable strictures caused a minor diplomatic incident, and M.
Laval apologized to the British ambassador. “England's policy,” mur-
mured the Gringoire,^ “consists of troubling the earth so that she can
rule the seas. ... I think English friendship the most cruel present the
gods can give a people. When I see England, the Bible in one hand, the
League of Nations Covenant in the other, upholding the cause of the
weak or righteous, I can’t but believe she has her own reasons. ... I
have seen His Majesty’s police slashing Egyptian students in the street
of Cairo. I saw the Lord Mayor of Cork dying in London in a criminal’s
cell. I saw convicts, disguised by Lloyd George as soldiers, shooting down

^ Britain was not, of course, the only country with an imperial policy. The United
States of America in the same period acquired Texas, the Panama Canal, the Philip-
pines, etc.

® Genet's translation in the New Yorker,

INSIDE EUROPE

276

the Balbriggan martyrs at their cottage doors. ... Is it indispensable
for human happiness that the route to India be British?”

Recently the New Leader printed a list of “independent territories”
which the British Government has annexed since 1870. Baluchistan.
Burma. Cyprus. Wei-hai-Wei. Hongkong. Koweit. Sinai. North Guinea.
South Guinea. East Guinea. Solomon Islands. Tonga Islands. Sudan.
Uganda. British East Africa. British Somaliland. Zanzibar. Transvaal.
Orange Free State. Rhodesia. British Central Africa. Nigeria. In addi-
tion the British Empire was in effect enlarged by mandated territories
acquired by the peace settlements of 1919. Palestine. Transjordan. Tan-
ganyika. Togo. Cameroons. South-West Africa. Apparently the British
themselves began to think this was a little too much. And the Italians
greeted with interested skepticism Sir Samuel Hoare’s careful hints in
his Assembly speech of September ii, 1935, that colonial raw materials
were inequitably distributed.

Sanctions

British policy in regard to sanctions (penalties) that might be applied
to Italy for violation of the Covenant of the League of Nations® did
not become clear till late in the teeming summer of 1935. At the begin-
ning the government took no strong line to prevent war. “It was,” wrote
the anonymous author of Inquest on Peace, “passionately sincere in its
desire that the lion and the lamb should lie down together. But it was
hazy whether the lamb ought to be outside or inside the lion.” Once
Mussolini had committed himself too far to go back, with a hundred
thousand troops in Abyssinia, British policy sharpened. The Admiralty
filled the Mediterranean with warships, and Eden pushed economic
sanctions through Geneva. Thus it was commonly bruited about that
the British were “out to bust” the Duce. This was far too blunt a way
to put it. What happened was that Britain was perplexed by the diffi-
culty of the decision it had to make. Its policy, founded on a double
negative, was equivocal. It did not want a war ; at the same time it did
not want permanently to affront Mussolini. On the one hand, the British
disliked the rupture of peace entailed by the Abyssinian campaign; on
the other they did not want to rupture the collective security system by
forcing Mussolini out of the League, and into the hands of Hitler.

Germany, as always, remained the chief preoccupation of British
foreign policy in Europe. A perfectly good case for or against

® For the League itself see Qiapter XXXVI below.

sane-

WAR IN ABYSSINIA

277

tions against Italy could be made with only the German imperative in
view. One might have favored sanctions, on the ground that vindication
of the League system and a sound setback to Mussolini in Abyssinia
would discourage Hitler from breaking the peace later. Or one might
have opposed sanctions, on the ground that they would weaken Italy,
shake up Central Europe, and give Hitler an excellent chance to expand
and profit.

There was also the question whether Britain could stop Mussolini
without risking a much bigger war than in the Abyssinian one. The British
cabinet was divided on this issue. Mussolini himself provoked a prelimi-
nary decision against Italy, by rashly filling Libya with Italian troops
and giving the impression of Italian designs on Malta and Egypt. The
British fleet did not concentrate in the Mediterranean until after at least
several Italian divisions, for no purpose connected with the actual cam-
paign in Ethiopia, had been sent to Libya and Cyrenaica.

The reasons for the sanctions policy provisionally adopted were,
roughly, the following:

First, as indicated above, the Abyssinian crisis was interpreted as a
''final” test of the League system. The issue was quite clear, whether
the League would go into the discard for good, or be made to work.
The very fact that Japan in Manchuria had successfully defied the
League made it the more necessary for the League powers to assert
themselves against Mussolini. Defiance of the Covenant had occurred,
without penalties, in distant Asia. Ethiopia — in Africa — ^was nearer
home. Let the Italians succeed in Ethiopia, and aggression would break
out in Europe next. Sanctions against Italy were in effect sanctions
against Germany later.

Second, the British Dominions, which since the Statute of Westmin-
ster have the right to secede from the British Empire, and which are
bound together only by the symbol of the crown, were vigorous in sup-
port of sanctions policy. There was plenty of idealism at Geneva in
September and October in 1935, and Canada and South Africa supplied
a fair share of it. It became clear to tlie seasoned and wary brains of
Whitehall that the League of Nations might turn out to be an inestimably
valuable agency for keeping the Empire solid.

Third, liberal opinion in England, which hated Fascism, was eager to
down Mussolini on moral-political grounds.’’^

^ Dean Inge, writing to the Times, expressed his fear of this. *1 think all friends
of the League,*' he wrote, “should beware of their involuntary association with

INSIDE EUROPE

278

Fourth, an extraordinary informal plebiscite, the "Teace Ballot,” was
taken in June in England by the League of Nations Union, under the
powerful leadership of Lord Cecil. Eleven and one-half million people
voted, and no fewer than 10,880,000 of them favored economic and non-
military sanctions against an aggressor, and actually 6,748,000 were will-
ing to support, ‘‘if necessary,” military sanctions. Now the average total
vote in a British general election is only about twenty million ; obviously
the government could not afford to dismiss this registry of opinion by
one-half of the electorate. The Peace Ballot strengthened the hands of
the pro-sanction members of the cabinet, like Eden, and confounded
those who disliked the League.

Fifth, the labor party, the official opposition, overwhelmingly approved
a sanctions policy.

Sixth, British imperial interests, as outlined above, became involved.
Idealism and what is called “character” play a certain role in British
policy, but idealism alone would not have prompted the first vigor of
British response to Italian aggression. Idealism plus Egypt, the Red Sea
and India, turned England against Italy. The conflict was between an
old and surfeited and a new and untried imperialism. As soon as Mus-
solini began to mass troops near Egypt, the British jumped.® Sir Sam-
uel Hoare — ^until he lost his job — ^was the luckiest foreign minister in
modern times ; he was able to write a policy in which idealism and im-
perialism exactly coincided. Not only God, but the British route to India,
was on his side.

Hoare-Laval Plan

But sanctions started slowly and half-heartedly in actual practice. Oil
was not included in the embargo, and British companies actually fur-
nished some of the petrol feeding Count Ciano^s planes. And at no time
were military sanctions — or closure of the Suez Canal — contemplated by
Britain or the League. Even so, a General Election was fought in
November in England largely on the peace-and-sanctions issue, and the
government, going to the country on a firm League platform, was over-
whelmingly successful. Thus it was an acute shock to public opinion
when, in December, news of the celebrated Hoare-Laval plan leaked out.

socialists who care nothing for Abyssinia or the League, but who wish to embroil
us with Italy because they hate and fear Fascism. If Russia were attacking Afghanis-
tan they would sing a very different tune

« At Geneva the story went that ‘'S. d. N.” (Sociefe des Nations) really stood
for “Source du Nile.”

WAR IN ABYSSINIA 279

The inside story of this plan seems to be the following. For some
weeks experts of the Foreign Office and the Quai d’Orsay were at work
trying to hammer out a formula to end the war. On Sunday, December
8th, Hoare went to Pans, had a few hours with M. Laval, and proceeded
to a badly needed rest and ice-skating holiday in Switzerland. A joint
Anglo-French statement was issued guardedly noting the progress made
toward a settlement. ‘‘There could be no question at present of publish-
ing these formulas,’’ the statement said. Then — ^what often happens —
some one in Paris leaked. The Monday papers in England were full of
more or less authoritative statements of the deal whereby Italy was to
be given a good share of Abyssinia as a bribe to call off the war.

The original statement had made it clear that the arrangement had not
yet been sanctioned by the British cabinet. Therefore the cabinet had
to do something in a hurry. It happened that the inaugural session of
the London Naval Conference was held in London this morning —
Monday, December 9th. I remember how everyone was surprised at
the extreme briefness of Mr. Baldwin’s opening address, and his apology
that he must depart at once to tend to urgent business. It certainly was
urgent, though few people knew then what was going on. The cabinet,
its hand forced by the leakage in Paris and the growing agitation of
public opinion, had to decide whether to accept the Hoare-Laval plan,
or repudiate Sir Samuel Hoare. It decided to accept the plan Every-
thing happened in a hurry. One story is that there were no maps in the
cabinet room, and ministers had to approve the plan without any idea of
how much Abyssinian territory Italy was to get.

The next day Baldwin made an amazing speech in the House, as more
and more details of the plan became known. Baldwin said that his “lips
were sealed,” but that if the trouble were over he could make such a
case that “not a man would go into the Lobby against us.” This piquant
observation aroused, naturally, much curiosity. Hoare himself was still
away. On the 13th the Anglo-French proposals were at last published.
They were even worse than had been anticipated in sanctionist circles.
And on the 14th it was revealed that Hoare had sent the British minister
in Abyssinia a telegram urging him to use “his utmost influence” on the
Emperor to give “careful and favorable consideration” to the proposals.

The storm in the country grew. Britain rose in bewilderment, indig-
nation, and alarm. Eden had the unpleasant job of explaining to his
friends how the British and French governments— after all— were sell-
ing the Abyssinians down the river. The Times and Daily Telegraphy

28 o

INSIDE EUROPE

usually stanch supporters of the government, began to waver. Person-
age after personage descended on Baldwin at lo Downing Street and
told him that the business simply would not do. Even the Tories re-
volted. Hoare came back from Switzerland. Somebody had to be the
culprit, some one had to suffer or the government itself might have
been overthrown. Pitched overboard like a blood sacrifice, Hoare re-
signed. And the plan was buried.

In his speech to the House of Commons on December 19th Hoare
could not tell the whole story. But he made a dignified defense of his
policy. There were many who thought that it was Baldwin who should
have resigned, not his foreign minister. After all, the cabinet as a whole
had presumably sanctioned Hoare’s dealings with Laval and certainly
had approved the plan. Baldwin, incidentally, has never ^'unsealed’’ his
lips. No word of explanation ever came from him as to what precisely,
he meant. Ever since the cartoonist David Low has portrayed him with
sticking-plaster across his mouth. One famous caricature shows Baldwin
with the corpse of the League behind him, muttering through the plaster,
^'You know you can trust me.*'

Six months later, in cooler days, it was easier to make an explanation.
Baldwin almost certainly was alluding to the possibility that sanctions,
especially if they were implemented by an oil embargo, might make
Mussolini angry enough to perish in a cloud of glory by attacking the
British fleet. What the British were doing was an attempt to stave off a
general European war. There were subsidiary considerations also. One
was the feeling in some British circles that Mussolini was losing the
Abyssinian war, and that if he lost he might collapse in Italy, which
would shake the whole European structure. Another — quite contrary —
was the conviction of some well-informed people that Mussolini was
not losing, but winning, the war, and that it was best to buy him off
with a slice of Abyssinia before he took it all.

If Mussolini had accepted the Hoare-Laval proposals, hejore they
were dropped by the British, what an odd irony it would have been!

Finis

Early in 1936, still worried by sanctions, Mussolini decided to trans-
form a colonial campaign into a major engagement, a real war, and with
almost half a million troops in Africa, using poison gas, the result could
not long be in doubt. Even so, the speed and vigor of the Italian advance
confounded all experts. They did not realize how badly armed and led

WAR IN ABYSSINIA

281

were the Abyssinians, nor the immense advantage of mechanization even
in guerrilla fighting on such difficult terrain. Badoglio’s campaign was a
military and engineering masterpiece. By April 15th the Italians had cap-
tured Dessie, having advanced the 120 miles from Quoram in the in-
credible time of nine days, and on May 5th they were in Addis Ababa.
The Emperor fled.

Hitler’s various victories, the Abyssinian campaign, the war in Spain,
are branches of the same poisonous tree. Qualified as the victories may
prove to be, they indubitably represent the temporary triumph of swift,
hard-hitting Fascism against the slow motion and diffusion of power of
the democracies. Mussolini’s victory was followed by Fascist forwardness
everywhere in Europe, as those who had hoped to check him with sanc-
tions had foreseen : Greiser in Danzig, Franco in Spain, put on their sev-
eral performances. Hitler and Mussolini came to represent almost iden-
tical dynamic forces. What went on in Europe was a struggle between
law and right on the one hand, and the big fist and the machine-gun on
the other. The struggle was between respect for international obligations
and the most forthright kind of adventurous and predatory nationalism.
The adventurers have won several highly important skirmishes. But de-
mocracy may have the final word.

Mussolini, a discerning and powerful gambler, set the Italian people
on new paths. But the future of Italy, like that of Germany, depends on
the British Empire. The cruel and youthful obstreperousness *of the Fas-
cist states must sooner or later come into conflict with the mature vitality
of England. So now we pause in this counterclockwise tour of Europe
and turn to Britain.

Chapter XVIII

England: The Ruling Classes

England is not to be saved by any single man,

— ^William Pitt

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle.

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise . , .

A t one and the same time, England, a puzzling nation, is the world's
^ firmest monarchy, strongest oligarchy, and freest democracy, and
its empire is the only one that survived the war. It is also an island of
country houses, built on a foundation of coal, which, in spite of the
strenuous difficulties of the age, remains prosperous. Two per cent of the
property owners of England own sixty-four per cent of the national
wealth. These persons comprise a fluid and impregnable ruling class, or
caste, which is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the world
to-day.

It was produced partly by geography ; it supports itself by ownership
of land or by trade in all the markets of the world ; its pays service to
conscience and religion ; the House of Commons and the House of Lords
are its clubs ; it believes in freedom of speech and the democratic process ;
it responds very sensitively to public opinion ; among its bastions are the
navy, the Bank of England, and the civil service; it was educated in
public schools and week-end houses ; its empire is its greatest pride.

The ruling classes absorb an acutely disproportionate share of the na-
tional income and of economic power. Take, for instance, the land of
London. One peer owns no less than two hundred and seventy acres in
the West End. Only about forty thousand of the eight million inhabit-
ants of London own any land at all, and the really valuable slices are in
the hands of about twenty men.^ There are about 100,000 people in Eng-
land with incomes over $10,000 per year, who take sixteen per cent of
the national income ; there are 18,000,000 whose wages, under $1,250 per

^ See Hugh Dalton, Practical Socmlism for Britain, p. 15 1.

282

ENGLAND: THE RULING CLASSES 2^3

year, are only fifty-six per cent of the national income. Of those who
die in England, ‘‘only one in four leaves as much as $500 worth of
property.’'

The House of Commons represents a considerable concentration of
wealth; a writer in the Sunday Express, has found, for instance, that
170 members of the House of Commons held 650 company director-
ships. One M.P. had 34. A recent book, “Tory M.P7’ is packed with
suggestive details of this kind. The New Statesman once published an
analysis of the occupation of the 729 peers who comprise the House of
Lords. Two hundred and forty-six owned land. One hundred and twelve
were directors in insurance companies, 74 financial or investment
houses, 67 in banks, 64 in railway companies, 49 in shipbuilding or
engineering companies, and so on. Interestingly enough, of the 729 peers,
371? or more than half, never once spoke in any debate in the House of
Lords from 1919 ^o 193^ > rn of them never voted in a single division;
the average number taking part in a division was 83.

The most important basic fact in British public and political life is
geographical. The British Isles are islands. And, as the schoolboy put it
in a famous definition, “an island is a piece of land entirely surrounded
by the British navy.” The English, a mixed race— composed of Angles,
Saxons, Jutes, Romans, Normans, Teutons, Celts — ^grew up and coa-
lesced in comparative isolation. Since Elizabeth they have been free from
intrusion by others and were free to intrude themselves upon others.
And their island heritage gave them a long view, because for genera-
tions they looked out to the sea. Geography has produced, in this im-
perial race, some magnificent provincialisms Two or three winters ago
a heavy storm completely blocked traffic across the Channel. “CONTI-
NENT ISOLATED,” the newspaper posters couldn’t help saying.

The weather has in fact — ^the same thing is true of many countries —
been an important political factor. In Austria, for instance, as I shall
try to show when we reach Central Europe, the enervating Fohn is re-
sponsible for many of the eccentricities of Austrian behavior. So in
England, fog and damp have chilled the national bones. I know that
from one point of view the English climate is the finest in the world,
because, as it has proudly been pointed out, you can play golf almost
every day in the year ; you may get wet, but you can play. The English-
man has his umbrella within reach almost from birth; growing up, he
is conditioned to preparation for any emergency, not merely those in
the realm of climate. The British Empire was the inevitable result of

INSIDE EUROPE

284

geographical and meteorological factors ; anyone who has survived a few
London winters knows why the Empire Builders sought the sun .2

England produces only about three-fifths of the food it needs and only
about twenty per cent of the raw materials which it transforms into
manufactured goods for all the markets of the world. But it is a country
rich in the right things— coal and iron and steel. It is, of course, the
most highly industrialized state in Europe. It produces so much wealth
that roughly forty per cent of its trade is export trade. And it gives the
world not only steel and shoes, cotton shirts and locomotive engines,
razor blades and cantilever bridges, but ships, insurance, and financial
services. I have mentioned the disproportion in individual British in-
comes. But the national income as a whole is much greater than that of
any other European country ; according to G. D. H. Cole, it is $435 per
capita m England, as against, for instance, $230 for Germany, $215 for
France, and only $140 for Mussolini’s Italy.

The ruling classes make most of their money by trade. Some members
live on the land, but trade is the predominant national occupation. ‘‘The
British,” it has been written, “are serious about their trade. It is the one
thing in life they are serious about. In England’s case, uniquely, God
and Mammon are one. Mammon’s appetite is tempered by the knowl-
edge that honesty is the best (paying) policy. God is goodness, justice,
love, mercy, and five per cent on a sound investment.” Factors of many
sorts contribute to make trade respectable and profitable; as Douglas
Jerrold wrote referring to older days, “No consideration of social jus-
tice must interfere with the right to buy cheap and sell dear.” Britain
is one of the few countries in the world where the use of the Union
Jack, the national flag, is permitted in the advertising of commercial
products. Even the Crown Jewels pay interest; to see them in the Tower
you pay sixpence.

For six days a week the Englishman worships at the Bank of Eng-
land, and on the seventh day at the Church of England. For religion is
a powerful force on the side of the ruling classes. Uniquely among
modern nations, the country has a national church, “an island religion,”
serving this one people. Associated with it, drawing strength from its
cool and privileged ritual, is the factor of morality. The standard of
public life in England is the highest in the world ; honor and idealism
play a part in politics that the suspicious foreigner finds it difficult to

2 And a psychologist might say that the national instinct for the accumulation of
wealth is associated with the concept of the rainy day.

ENGLAND: THE RULING CLASSES 285

understand. Honor and idealism do, of course, correspond as a rule
with practical interests. The Germans not only broke a treaty by invad-
ing Belgium: they shot an arrow toward the Channel ports. But the
fact remains, as a diplomat of consequence remarked to a friend of
mine, ^'England is the most dangerous country in the world, because it
is the only one capable of going to war on behalf of another country.”^

The ruling classes believe in freedom, in democracy, partly because,
as Trevelyan says, freedom and democracy are so much more efficient
than despotism. The English people, like the French, have paid a high
price for freedom ; to gam freedom they had to shed the blood of kings.
The execution of Charles I made great inroads on the English conscience,
and the constitutional privileges and prerogatives of parliament are, to
this day, zealously guarded. One is astounded in reading English history
to note the great number of men who had their heads chopped off for
freedom. English democracy is conservative, and the Englishman defines
the word “conservatism’’ quite literally; it means to conserve things.
Nothing but a great fire can destroy an3rthing in England.

The parliamentary tradition of Westminster is the envy of the world ;
and with reason. In a dictatorship, the individual exists as a servant of
the state; in democracies, the state is theoretically the servant of the
individual No Englishman forgets this. And, as Stanley Baldwin said
in one of his most famous speeches, England has had only ten years of
dictatorship in the past three hundred years. The English parliamen-
tarians play the game in the grand manner. After an election the oppos-
ing candidates shake hands, exactly as if it had been a game of tennis.
When Baldwin became prime minister for the first time, one of the first
things he did was to call on Lord Oxford, his most eminent adversary,
to ask advice.

Most Englishmen, of course, prize England above party; which is
one reason for British capacity for self-government. When a prominent
Tory, like Lord Curzon, dies, the labor members eulogize him in the
House of Commons. During the General Strike of 1926, as everyone
knows, Welsh strikers and police took Sunday off to play football.

Even the poorest of the poor are loyal. Visitors from abroad to the
Tyneside and Durham are incredulous that poverty of such miserable

® One may point out, on the other hand, that few of the many Britons who were
profoundly shocked morally by the Abyssinian war noted that at the same time
30,000 British and Indian troops were ‘‘cleaning up” the Afridis on the Northwest
frontier of India. Not that the two cases were analogous

286

INSIDE EUROPE

proportions does not produce revolution. There are two millions of un-
employed in England, and of them perhaps a million can never hope to
get jobs again; but not only is the thought of revolution an absurdity,
but a good proportion of the unemployed vote conservative instead of
labor. One reason is the fear of the middle classes that labor is not
"‘experienced’' enough to form a successful government. Another is the
social insurance and paternalistic legislation of modern England; the
country buys off unrest by paying $10,000,000 per week to support the
unemployed.*^

The instruments of domination by the ruling classes are several. There
is, for instance, the Admiralty, which is a law unto itself. There is, for
instance, the Bank, “ a most peculiar institution.” The elasticity of the
nobility, which constantly enriches itself by vulgar blood, is another
factor. So is the public school — ^the fetish of the “old school tie.” Of the
fifty-five members of the last British cabinet and junior ministers, no
fewer than sixteen went to Eton, six to Harrow, and seventeen to other
public schools of recognized quality.® When, I have heard, Mr. Baldwin
needed a new secretary, he simply telephoned the treasury and asked
for “a Harrow boy” ; it was the only qualification he demanded.

“When the call came to me to form a government,” Mr. Baldwin has
written in On England, “one of my first thoughts was that it should be
a government of which Harrow should not be ashamed. I remembered
how in previous governments there had been four or, perhaps, five Har-
rovians, and I determined to have six. To make a cabinet is like making
a jig-saw puzzle fit, and I managed to make my six fit by keeping the
post of Chancellor of the Exchequer for myself. ... I will, with God’s
help, do nothing in the course of an arduous and difficult career which
shall cause any Harrovian to say of me that I have failed to do my
best to live up to the highest ideals of the School.”

Another instrument of rule is the country house. No one should think
that a group of aristocratic plotters spend the week-end putting their
heads together for conspiracy or mischief. It is ever so much more
casual and less sinister than that. But suppose that the editor of a great
newspaper wants to meet a promising labor politician. The country house,

^The British grumble a great deal at such charges, but they remain, on the
whole, impregnably good-humored What is one to say about a House of Commons
that greets the new 1939 income tax— basic rate 3754% !— with laughter and cheers?

**Of the ninety-seven ministers who have been in the cabinet since the war,
forty went to either Oxford or Cambridge. But a university career is not quite so
important rituahstically as education in a great public school.

ENGLAND: THE RULING CLASSES

287

like that of the Lady Astor at Cliveden, is the perfect place. Wealthy
and influential people, often bored with their formal duties, go to the
country in order to get out of London, the ugliest and most uncomfort-
able city in the world ; they invented the long week-end to stay away as
long as possible. Their metier is politics ; they talk politics ; and they
make politics, quite spontaneously.

The Tories, it was explained to me when I arrived in London, make
a practice of lassoing the best brains in England. When some one arises
with brains who is not a Tory, the Tories promptly attempt to appropriate
him. Social flattery is an excellent weapon. It was the country-house
system that helped to seduce Ramsay MacDonald from nationalization
of the mines to nationalization merely of the cabinet. One must be to the
country house born. Otherwise, it goes to one's head, feet, and tongue.
Let any really intelligent and vigorous champion of the Left arise, and
presently he will find his way thorny with the invitations of the rich.

Newspapers are also a powerful instrument of rule. The ruling classes
pay little attention to Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail or Lord Bea-
verbrook of the Daily Express, the ‘Tress lords" of the nineteen-twen-
ties, who, for all their shouting — ^and despite Beaverbrook's impishly at-
tractive personality — are nowadays without much influence. The rebound
of their ill-advised campaign to wreck Baldwin seriously damaged them.
But Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times, is certainly one of the
ten most important people in England. And J. L. Garvin of the Observer
is a potent influence, even though he took the unpopular side in the
Abyssinian war and lost all contact with reality in regard to Spain and
Czechoslovakia.

Then consider the civil service, which is the incorruptible spinal col-
umn of England. My office boy, if he were reasonably presentable and
adaptable, could conceivably fill the office of chancellor of the exchequer
or minister of war ; the permanent staff would carry on. Men like Sir
Robert Vansittart, formerly the head of the foreign office, and Sir War-
ren Fisher, who for years ran the treasury, are among the characters
who really rule England. About most of these all-but-anonymous men—
Vansittart, who has published belles-lettres and poetry, is an exception
— ^little is known. They avoid the limelight. They flourish in the shadows.
And their power is immense. Consider, for instance, the indispensable
quality of a man like Sir Maurice Hankey, whose very name is unknown
to millions, but who combined in his person the posts of secretary to the
cabinet, secretary to the privy council, and secretary to the committee of

288

INSIDE EUROPE

imperial defense.® What is more, other Vansittarts, other Fishers, even
other Hankeys, shadows behind shadows, are continually in course of
training, to take over their masters' jobs after retirement. No man is
indispensable. The mechanism is self-perpetuating.

England is a thicket of stylistic difficulties, and the ruling classes are
able to entrench themselves behind a massive hedge not only of privi-
lege but of tradition. In no country may a man be so easily penalized for
gauchene\ and a young M.P. told me the other day that it had taken
him about two years to master the intricacies of parliamentary procedure.
What is one to say about a country where the "‘Lord" Privy Seal may
be a commoner, where the King's youngest son only became a peer after
his marriage, where the monarch may not even enter the House of Com-
mons? The English constitution is not a document. No British M.P. may
resign (he must make application for the ‘"Chiltern Hundreds"). And
the prime minister gets no salary as prime minister !

The ruling classes employ propaganda far more artful than any ever
dreamed of by Dr. Goebbels. They often stoop to censorship, but always
in the quietest possible way; it is usually censorship not by ukase but
by voluntary conspiracy. Every editor in Fleet Street knew, for instance,
of British fleet movements during the sanctions crisis ; but no one printed
anything, not even the opposition papers. The conspiracy of silence in
regard to Mrs. Simpson before the abdication is another case in point.
The method of persuasion is the only one employed. ‘‘Look, my dear fel-
low," and official of the foreign office may say, “I can't ask you to do
this for me, but it would be awfully decent if you would."

The ruling classes, by virtue of the single-member constituency sys-
tem, gerrymander elections in a manner which, if it happened in Bul-
garia or Turkey, would make liberal editors explode in indignation. In
the 1931 “National Government" election, for instance, the Baldwin-
Simon-MacDonald coalition got 556 seats for 14,500,000 votes, whereas
the opposition, with the quite respectable total of 7,200,000 votes, got
only 59 seats. In the election of November 14, 1935, the government
polled only fifty-four per cent of the votes cast, but got 428 seats out
of 615. If the voting had been by proportional representation, the gov-
ernment's majority would have been 48 instead of 250. But as it hap-
pened, the opposition got no less than forty-six per cent of the total
poll — ^and was condemned to impotence for another five years.

• In 1939, on the outbreak of war, Hankey became a cabinet minister without
portfolio.

ENGLAND: THE RULING CLASSES 289

The ruling classes, finally, despite the misery of the '‘Special” (i e.,
Distressed) Areas, have produced not only complete political stability,
but a striking measure of industrial recovery. There were Cassandras
in the middle twenties who said that Britain was “done”; they were
wrong Together with domestic strength came a renewal of predomi-
nance in international affairs. Britain, which had been tempted toward
isolation by imperial preoccupations, joined once more, in full voice, the
concert of European powers. Then — ^necessarily in the turbulent period
that was impending — the British inaugurated a tremendous program of
rearmament, called “national defense,” to cost at least £1,500,000,000.

Miscellany

Among many other forces and counter-forces, players and counter-
players, in the broad arena of English political life :

Cricket and the ritualistic attitude to fair play that it has produced.

The nonconformist conscience.

The decline in the birth-rate, which, according to competent estimates,
will reduce the population to thirty-three million by 1985.

Assorted personalities like the Very Rev. W. R. Inge, the former
Dean of St. Paul’s, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith, and Professor
Harold J. Laski.

The bold and irreverent cartoons of David Low, the greatest carica-
turist in the world.

The open forum in Hyde Park, something unique and cardinal.

The f ather-to-son tradition in politics ; not only does Randolph Church-
ill seek to follow Winston, but labor politicians pass on their hopes and
aspirations . the son of Arthur Henderson is in the House of Commons.
So are Lloyd George’s children.

The publishing house of Victor Gollancz, Ltd.

The fact that politics is the first profession of the land.

Letters to the Times.

Willingness of party or personality to admit defeat, and play the game
loyally thereafter. Winston Churchill fought his own party’s India Bill
with magnetic persistence for a number of years ; soon after it became
law he re-entered the party fold.

The rule of thumb.

Economists of various breeds : J. M. Ke3mes, Sir Arthur Salter, Lord
Stamp, Sir Walter La)rton.

The formidable severity of English law.

INSIDE EUROPE

290

An ingrained pacifism in the younger men, who dislike their former
military titles. Captain Duff Cooper, the first lord of the Admiralty, is
Mr, Duff Cooper ; Captain Anthony Eden is Mr. Anthony Eden ; Cap-
tain Ormsby-Gore, the former colonial secretary, is Mr. Ormsby-Gore.
Some years ago Major Walter Elliot went so far as to issue an an-
nouncement saying that he was to be known thereafter as Mr. Walter
Elliot.

The intelligence service of the Admiralty.

The death duties.

The investigations of Royal Commissions.

The radicalism of many Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates.

The tradition of venerableness. A politician may be still a promising
young man at fifty-five. Mr. Baldwin once referred to the ‘'tender age”
of one of his parliamentary secretaries, a stripling of forty-two. Bald-
win himself did not enter the House of Commons until he was forty-one.

The habit of the Archbishop of Canterbury occasionally to write to
the Times appealing for public prayer in regard to a political issue, e.g.,
in February, 1935, when the India Bill was nearing completion.

The fantastic number of humanitarian societies.

The cathedral close.

Clubs.

The Federation of British Industries.

The pacifism of Canon "Dick” Sheppard and the Oxford group.

The apparent disposition of women to have an OEdipus Complex on
their fathers. The British is a masculine civilization. Women wear man-
nish clothes ; they hunt foxes ; they are fierce parliamentarians.

The village pub.

The tradition of what is "done,” and the fact that everybody who is
"in” has known everybody else since childhood.

Imperialism, which extends beyond Empire bounds, Portugal for in-
stance is almost as much in the British sphere of influence as Malta. So
— following the return of George II of the Hellenes — ^may be Greece.

Punch,

The high salaries paid judges, members of the cabinet, and ambas-
sadors.

Inner Circle?

One should not be tempted to think that the ruling classes comprise
a body which could meet in a room, elect a chairman, and perform the

ENGLAND: THE RULING CLASSES

291

organic functions of domination. England possesses no close, tight oli-
garchy like that once represented by the regents of the Banque de France.
One might say that a certain number of persons comprise an '‘inner-
ring,” for instance Lord Baldwin, Lord Tyrrell (former ambassador to
Pans), Geoffrey Dawson of the Times, Lord Salisbury, the great econ-
omist Lord Stamp, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Derby, IMontague
Norman, and Sir Maurice Hankey. But no two observers would agree
on the names to be included, Baldwin and Chamberlain aside. The
"ring” is not a ring in other words : at least not a fixed immutable ring.
Indeed the great strength of the ruling classes is fluidity. One may be
a member of one of the oldest aristocratic houses in the British Isles,
and yet not be "in” ; mere wealth has very little to do with privilege ;
brains alone are not enough ; character may be.

Royal

King George V, it is realized now, who died in January, 1936, was one
of those rare kings who had personal historical importance. First, he
supported Mr. Asquith in the great struggle with the House of Lords
in 1910, by agreeing to create enough new peers to inundate the old
aristocracy, if the Lords persisted in their refusal to accept the "people's
budget” of the Commons. Second, he "sent for” Baldwin instead of Lord
Curzon in 1923 to succeed Bonar Law as prime minister, and thus
paved the way for the long Baldwin premiership later. The next year,
though labor could form only a minority government, he named Ramsay
MacDonald prime minister, making possible the first Socialist Govern-
ment in British history. Finally, on his own initiative he traveled from
Balmoral to London on August 22, 1931, in the middle of the financial
crisis, and persuaded MacDonald to form a National Government. "By
God, sir, you have got me into this, and now you must get me out,” he
told MacDonald,

King George — considerable tribute to the stability of British politics —
had only five prime ministers in the twenty-five years of his reign which
were celebrated by the Silver Jubilee of May, 1935. He liked Asquith,
personally, best. The Jubilee, silver in name, w^as worth its weight in
gold. Not only did it symbolize the return of comparative prosperity to
Britain (and incidentally bring millions of pounds in trade to London),
but it expressed with great brilliance the affection with which the nation
regarded the Royal Family. The King was intensely touched, and, since
he was a modest man, astounded at the colossal mass emotion his pres-

INSIDE EUROPE

292

ence evoked. The origins of the Jubilee were obscure. There was no
precedent for the celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the ac-
cession of a monarch. No one, when the matter was first discussed in
the House of Commons, anticipated the depth and range of celebration
that occurred.

The King of England, no matter who he happens to be, is a person-
age of great political consequence. First of all, the Palace is the ultimate
citadel of the ruling classes ; the men who rule England live in widen-
ing concentric circles around the throne. Second, since the Statute of
Westminster the person of the King is the chief link between England
and the self-governing dominions. Third, the King and his circle are a
sort of gyroscope stabilizing the machinery of government. The King
is — ^and must be — outside of party politics (as was demonstrated in no
uncertain way by Edward VIIPs abdication), but he exerts serious in-
fluence through his choice of advisers and he has the right to appraise
and consult in all matters of foreign and domestic policy.

Most of those personages nearest the King are, it goes without say-
ing, Tories. He is himself quite above politics, but it would be the
strangest thing in the world if his private sympathies and habits did
not correspond to those of representatives of the ruling classes who com-
prise the court circle. What will happen if, some day in future, Sir
Stafford Cripps or some other radical socialist leader is prime minister
and demands, like Mr. Asquith, the creation of a thousand new peers,
in order to expedite urgent social legislation through the House of Lords ?
The King, according to precedent, would have to submit to the prime
minister's advice. But, as I heard it shrewdly said, '‘Constitutionalism in
England is what is done"; and the conservative advisers of the court
might have a good deal to say.

Foreign Policy

British foreign policy, which is extraordinarily constant, changing
little (as Sir Samuel Hoare recently said) from generation to genera-
tion, is based, broadly speaking, on the concept of the balance of power
with Britain holding the balance. "All our greatest wars," Sir Austen
Chamberlain put it, "have been fought to prevent one great military
power dominating Europe, and at the same time dominating the coasts
of the Channel and the ports of the Low Countries." Trevelyan has
said, "From Tudor times onwards, England treated European politics
simply as a means of insuring her own security from invasion and

ENGLAND: THE RULING CLASSES 293

furthering her designs beyond the ocean.” In modern times, follow-
ing this policy, Britain has tended, when France was stronger than
Germany, to support Germany; when Germany was stronger than
France, to support France. For a time the League of Nations was
a convenient mechanism to this end; thus came the period of Collective
Security. Since, with great shrewdness in 1919, Britain obtained the
entrance of the Dominions (and India) into the League as separate
states, she is always able to dominate its deliberations. Before the war
it was a cardinal principle of British politics not to commit the nation
to any action on the Continent in regard to hypothetical future con-
tingencies. Locarno, the apex of the balance of power policy, changed
this. All these considerations are, of course, dominated by the principle
of Pax Britannica; Britain, a great trading nation, wants peace.

Another and very curious minor factor should be mentioned. It causes
much puzzlement to observers on the Continent. The British think even
of foreign policy as a sort of game. Unlike the Germans or the French,
to whom politics is a matter of life or death, the British are capable of
extreme detachment in the direction of their complex foreign aifairs.
Europe is a sort of stage; the play that is going on is a play. And if
some one misses his cue, or blunders with his lines, the average Briton
always assumes that the drama is merely in rehearsal, and can be played
over again — ^better.

Roughly there were two groups in the foreign office before 1939. The
first comprised pro-Leaguers who are idealists. They hoped through a
system of collective security to bring Germany into the amicable con-
cert of great powers. They thought of war as a literal horror; the
Abyssinian crisis meant to them the collapse of moral law in Europe.
The second group, mostly represented by older men, were willing
enough to give the League a bit of rope, but they distrusted the efficacy
of the collective security principle, and put their hopes in ( i ) a powerful
navy, and (2) isolationism. The opinions of this group served to en-
courage Germany, because isolation — ^non-interference in Europe — ^was
for a time tantamount to taking the German side.

Strong pro-German influences existed in England, even after the dic-
tatorship of Hitler. The War of 1939, of course, blotted them out. Sum-
mary of them:

(a) Many Tories feared bolshevism, and stupid ones thought of
Hitler as a sort of guarantee against future encroachments westward on
the part of Russia. England and Germany should be allies against

INSIDE EUROPE

294

Russia, the great communist enemy. Moreover, Russia has always been
a “traditional” foe ; communism serves to make it doubly dangerous.

{h) The City of London, with enormous investment in Germany,
allowed itself to be dazzled by the spurious brilliance of Dr. Schacht.

{d) A group of personalities around Lord Lothian (formerly Philip
Kerr, Lloyd George's alter ego at the Peace Conference, and now
British Ambassador to the United States), for a considerable time
thought that a stable Germany, under Hitler, would insure peace.
Lothian is a Christian Scientist and Christian Scientists, who do not
believe in death or evil, found it easier than members of other religions
to accept at face value Hitler’s promises.

{e) The London Times (Lothian and Geoffrey Dawson, its editor,
are close friends) is, of course, irrefragably independent; its Berlin cor-
respondence has performed noble service in revealing Nazi brutality and
prejudice; but it dislikes the communists more than the Nazis, and some-
times it gave Hitler more than the benefit of the doubt in matters of
foreign policy.

(/) A tendency existed in England to be sorry for Germany in its role
of conquered but honorable foe. (By contrast, the French will never for-
give Germany for the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles.)

{g) Oddly enough, some forces in the Labour party were pro-German.
It is obvious that British socialists and trade unionists under Naziism
would suffer even as their German colleagues, but labor foreign policy
in Great Britain was erected on dislike of the Versailles Treaty and plea
for fair play to Germany, and even outrages performed upon labor by
Hitler did not much modify pro-Germanism in some circles of the British
Left.7

The British reply to Hitler’s program of aggression was a typical
compromise; first, the British bought off competition at sea by the
famous Anglo-German naval pact; second, the cabinet announced meas-
ures to triple the British Air Force, and the great rearmament program
got — slowly — ^under way.

The former sympathy for Germany in England produced a certain
paradox. Among personalities it was that they were pro-German and

^ Harold Laski mentioned once that Woodrow Wilson was responsible for this,
because he invented the demarcation between the ruler of Germany and the German
“people” To many laborites and liberals Hitler was Wilsoffs Kaiser Wilhelm.

ENGLAND: THE RULING CLASSES 295

(many of them) anti-Fascist at the same time, which was tantamount
to eating an orange, say, with one half of the mouth, and spitting it out
at the same time with the other half. In policy it was that Britain was
rearming might and main against Germany, the only conceivable enemy,
while a powerful share of opinion did what it could to strengthen the
putative enemy’s hand.

Britain was, of course, waiting, playing for time, until its own tre-
mendous rearmament plans should be complete.

Chapter XIX

The Abdication Crisis

jONG ago, in February, 1936, I started to write a character sketch of
I— Edward of Wales. I didn’t finish it but in rummaging to-day through
my notes for that old article I found one of the lines I had contemplated
using. I had completely forgotten it. It was, ‘Terhaps Edward is one
of those kings who will have to make history some day — even if he
doesn’t want to.”

Edward, the most famous young man in the world, began his brief
and startling reign on a note of sensible modernity. He turned the
clocks in Sandringham to the right time (they had been set half an
hour fast since the time of Edward VII, to give more daylight for
hunting). He broke all precedent by flying to London immediately
his father died. He addressed Parliament in the first person. On March
1st, he spoke to millions of listeners throughout the Empire on the
radio. At once it was apparent that a new freshness, a note of informal-
ity and daring, was blowing through royal affairs.

Nervous, headstrong, inclined to be very stubborn, extraordinarily
likable, with great private and public charm, Edward was always sup-
posed to have been somewhat ‘‘pink.” He had strong humanitarian feel-
ings about poverty, slums, and the underdog. When he visited Austria
in 1935 he embarrassed the clerical authorities by insisting on visiting
the Karl Marx Hof, the socialist tenement which the year before they
had attacked and partially destroyed by shell fire. Though a crown was
on his head, Edward was emphatically a people’s man. Early in his reign
he went to Glasgow to inspect the Queen Mary and stayed to sympa-
thize with the people in its slums. This note in his character caused
some political alarm when, in the autumn of 1936, he visited the dis-
tressed mining districts in South Wales, saw the unutterably grisly
conditions of blight and suffering there, and said — ^perhaps rashly —
that “something would be done.”

Rather illogically, some whisperers had it that Edward had Fascist
or even Nazi sympathies. Incipient Fascists and Nazis are “pink,” too,
in that they try to cash in on the sympathies of the laboring class. The
royal family in England has had a long reputation of being privately

296

THE ABDICATION CRISIS

297

pro-German. Edward was rather conspicuously cordial to Von Neurath
when the German foreign minister came to London, and some of his
friends were good friends of Von Ribbentrop’s. On the other hand,
Edward was cordial to Litvinov, too. And seemingly Edward blasted
forever any talk of Naziness by choosing, of all persons in the world, to
seek refuge after his abdication with some one who was not only Jewish,
but an Austrian Jew of a great international banking family — ^the
kind of Jew that the Nazis particularly detest.

Edward's first months as king rolled along smoothly and easily. He
was enormously popular. He swallowed the ritual and stuffiness of
monarchy, which he didn't very much care for, with dignity and good
grace. He was unconventional, yes ; he got nd of some of the oldsters
around the Palace and found new friends, yes ; but as far as most good
informants could judge the way was clear for a long and perhaps un-
eventful reign, cheerier and more vivid than that of his father, but
sound and in the Georgian tradition nevertheless. The good informants
were wrong. Everybody was wrong. A storm gathered around the
Palace such as had not been seen in England for a thousand years. The
storm was personified by an American, Mrs. Wallis Simpson.

Enter Mrs, Simpson

Such a blazing tornado of words was spilled on the whole incred-
ible case that it is necessary now to foreshorten it drastically. Bessie
Wallis Warfield was born in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, in
1896, of an old Southern family that had come on hard times. Geneal-
ogists even tried to trace her descent to William the Conqueror. She
grew up in Baltimore, a Southern belle who was chic and amiable but
not particularly distinguished — ^just one of dozens of pretty, bright,
modern young girls — ^and she caused the most severe constitutional
crisis in modern British history and became the central figure of what
H. L. Mencken called “the greatest news story since the Resurrection"
because — in 1916 — she met and married a young American naval officer,
Lieutenant Earl W. Spencer, Jr.

Eleven years later, in 1927, she divorced him. That divorce doomed
everything In those days Mrs. Spencer could not possibly have imagined,
in her most vivid dreams, that the legal dissolution of this marriage
would prevent her later from being a queen, and cost t^^e throne of a
king who loved her. One divorce would have been enough. The impla-
cable fury of the bishops, the Puritans, the parliamentarians, was di-

INSIDE EUROPE

298

rected against Mrs. Simpson not because she was a commoner (the
present Queen was a commoner until her marriage to the Duke of York),
not even because she was an American by birth, but because she was a
divorcee. It was intolerable to their minds that anyone living could
have known the person of the Queen.

One divorce, it is clear, would have been enough to cause catastrophe.
Re-marriage after divorce simply filled the cup to angry overflowing. In
1928, freed from Lieutenant Spencer, she married a young New Yorker,
Ernest Aldrich Simpson, who had served in the Coldstream Guards,
entered a London shipping business, and become a British citizen. The
Simpsons moved to London (by marrying Mr. Simpson she herself
automatically became a British subject) and entered the smart life of
young Mayfair people. In 1931 she was presented at court, and a year
or so later she and the then Prince of Wales became friends.

There was nothing in the least abnormal or vicious about this. The
Simpsons and their circle did nothing that millions of people in the world
don^t do. They danced; they flirted; they drank cocktails (for some
reason the word ‘‘cocktail” always connotes ominous scandal to an
archbishop) ; they had good conversation. Mrs. Simpson was not — ^and
is not — ^in any sense a vulgar, pretentious, or grasping person. She had
— ^and has — ^great social grace, modesty, tact, and a very fair wit. She
was a great deal more intelligent than many in the Palace circle. She was
a comfortable person to be with. She was an excellent influence on the
Prince. She treated him like a man and a human being, not as an Heir
Apparent and a puppet, and he became deeply devoted to her. Seem-
ingly for the first time in his life, he was happily in love.

While he was still Prince their attachment went forward without
embarrassing publicity. Mrs. Simpson was first mentioned in American
newspapers in the summer of 1934 during a holiday at Cannes. Later
she was a member of a party that accompanied the Prince to Budapest
and Vienna early in 1935. When King George V died in January, 1936,
it became more difficult for the Prince, as King, to keep his personal
affairs purely personal. A man can be so public, G. K. Chesterton once
wrote, than he can have no private life. The new King determined,
thereupon, to bring matters gradually to light. He had always detested
sham and humbug. In the summer of 1936 Mrs. Simpson and a party
accompanied him on a yachting cruise in the Mediterranean and ^Egean.
They were widely photographed together on the Dalmatian coast and
in Turkey, but few of these photographs were published in England,

THE ABDICATION CRISIS

299

and none of them identified Mrs. Simpson. The more the King tried
to get the matter aboveboard, the more conspiratorial became the British
press to bury any hint of ‘‘scandal.” Twice, as if trying to give a lead
to the people, the King saw to it that Mrs. Simpson's name was in-
cluded in the court circular. Once the occasion was a dinner party at
which Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin were present, the other the arrival of
Mrs. Simpson and several of her friends at Balmoral.

What happened then was that the King, irritated, decided to settle
matters once for all by marriage. The friendship might have gone on
gaining slow ground and sympathy. But torrents of gossip were loose.
In exclusive circles in England — ^and everywhere in America — ^people
talked of nothing else. It became known in mid-August that Mrs.
Simpson was about to bring divorce proceedings against her husband.
The King wanted marriage. He was dissatisfied with the status quo,
and perhaps he realized that it was untenable. The initiative in dissolving
the Simpson marriage was, according to all accounts, his. Mrs. Simpson
got her decree nisi on October 27th at Ipswich Assizes. By this time
the whole world — Britain excepted, where a voluntary censorship re-
mained in force— was standing in line to see what would come next
In six months, on April 27th, Mrs. Simpson would be free to marry
the King and perhaps become Queen, provided the Proctor did not
intervene and make a final divorce decree impossible.

But some other things intervened — ^the Church of England, the House
of Commons, and Mr. Stanley Baldwin.

'When I Give I Give Myself^

The storm was bound to break. The Times on November 30th uttered
a curious covert warning in an otherwise meaningless editorial: “The
Commons may well prove itself what the country has often required
in similar times ... a Council of State [to govern] in any crisis,

foreign or domestic.” The next day, as if by prearranged signal, the

Bishop of Bradford struck against the King with the words, “The

King's personal views are his own, but it is still an essential part of the

idea of kingship . . . that the King needs the grace of God for his
office. We hope he is aware of his need. Some of us wish he gave more
positive signs of his awareness.”

Some observers believe that a Palace clique, together with high and
stodgy members of the Conservative party, maneuvered to make the
Bishop speak as he did. The clique was offended, so the stories went.

INSIDE EUROPE

300

not so much at Mrs. Simpson (whom they might have swallowed),
but at the King's disregard of ancient norms and traditions, his political
"capriciousness/' his alleged determination to be an active ruler, not a
mere symbol.

The Bishop himself soon explained that he had not referred to any
aspect of the King's private life, only to the fact that the Coronation
(mostly a religious ceremony) was coming on and that Edward didn't
go to church. He said categorically that when he wrote his address he
had absolutely never heard of "‘these [Simpson] rumors." This may
quite possibly be true. It may also be true that the Bishop was the
innocent victim of subtler powers behind the scenes who put him up to
making his address.

At any rate, the British public, that vast mass which was not “inside"
on all the gossip, heard with utter surprise and bewilderment that a
Bishop of the Church of England had rebuked the monarch in terms
unknown in England for hundreds of years. Why? And for what? What
had the King done? The country held its collective head in amazem-^nt
and alarm. Their curiosity was soon satisfied. By December 3rd the
papers had broken the censorship self-imposed through the Newspaper
Proprietors Association, and the whole terrific story surged out.

Not just the story of Edward's attachment to an American woman
with two husbands living. The story of a major struggle over the
future of the King himself.

Mr. Baldwin — ^the account of him in the next chapter may illuminate
some of the factors in his complex character — ^went to the King on
October 20th, on his own initiative, for what was in effect a secret
meeting at Fort Belvedere. Baldwin reported to the monarch his alarm
at the growing wave of stories about Mrs. Simpson, his fear that pub-
licity was imminent and would damage the Crown, and his concern at
the changed situation which might follow the Ipswich divorce.

(No one knew of this meeting between Baldwin and the King until
Baldwin spoke in Parliament on December loth. Nor of the subsequent
secret meetings. The country was almost entirely in the dark. Yet one
cannot fairly complain to Mr. Baldwin for not having shouted the
details from the chimneypots.)

A second meeting took place, at the King's command, on Novem-
ber i6th.

By that date [Mr. Baldwin told parliament] the decree nisi was pro-
nounced in the divorce case and I felt it my duty ... to begin the con-

THE ABDICATION CRISIS

301

versation, and I spoke to His Majesty for a quarter of an hour on the
question of marriage.

Again you must remember my Cabinet hadn’t been in this at all. I
reported to about four of my senior colleagues the conversation at
Belvedere.

^ I told him [His Majesty] that I did not think that the particular mar-
riage was one that would receive the approbation of the country.

That marriage would have involved a lady becoming Queen, and I did
tell His Majesty once that I might be a remnant of the old Victorians but
my worst enemy could not say this of me — that I did not know what the
reaction of the English people would be to any particular course of
action.

I cannot go further into the details, but that was the substance, and I
pointed out to him that the position of the King’s wife was different from
the position of the wife of any citizen of the country. It was part of the
price the King has to pay. His wife becomes the Queen. The Queen be-
comes the Queen of the country, and, therefore, in the choice of the Queen
the voice of the people must be heard.

And then His Majesty said to me, and I had his permission to tell you
this, that he wanted to tell me something that he had long wanted to tell
me. He said: ‘T am going to marry Mrs. Simpson and I am prepared
to go.”

I said : “Sir, that is most grievous news and it is impossible for me to
make any comment on it today.”

So Mr. Baldwin, on his personal responsibility, told the King on
November i 6 th that the marriage was an impossibility. At this point
only four members of the Cabinet had been informed, and apparently
there had been no contact at all with the Dominions. Baldwin himself —
and only Baldwin — decided that Mrs. Simpson could not be Queen.

The third meeting was on November 20th. Here the possibility of a
compromise in the form of a morganatic marriage was first brought up.
The King might marry Mrs. Simpson and Parliament might pass a
bill — since morganatic marriage does not legally exist in England —
specifying that she should not be Queen. Mr. Baldwin does not say
who precisely suggested this compromise. His words are simply, “The
suggestion had been made to me.” He does not say specifically that the
King suggested it. The King, in his words, merely “asked me if that
proposition had been put up to me.” Baldwin replied “Yes” and the
King asked him what he thought of it. Baldwin goes on:

I told him that I had given it no considered opinion, but if he asked me
my first reaction it was that Parliament would never pass it.

I said that if he desired I would examine it formally. He said he did so

INSIDE EUROPE

302

desire. Then I said it will mean my putting it formally before the whole
Cabinet and communicating with all the Prime Ministers of the domin-
ions, and asked if that was his wish. He told me that it was, and I said I
would do it.

(Meanwhile, among the 45,000,000 people of Britain, not a dozen
knew that these tremendous colloquies were going on. Baldwin con-
sulted — ^he was ‘'ashamed to confess’’ — none of his colleagues . . .)

On December 2nd Baldwin saw the King again for the fourth decisive
meeting. And Baldwin told him that although his inquiries were not
complete, they had proceeded far enough to indicate that neither Britain
nor the Dominions would tolerate a morganatic marriage.

In this statement is the crux of the whole story, so far as Baldwin’s
conduct is concerned. Were his inquiries correctly performed and did
he derive the correct conclusions therefrom ? If so, he was right in being
the agent whereby Edward was chucked off the throne. If not, Baldwin
cost the Empire its King unjustly.

The Prime Minister’s speech proceeds :

His Majesty asked me if I could answer his question [if a morganatic
marriage was possible] ... I gave him the reply. . . . His Majesty
said he was not surprised at that answer. He took my answer without
question and he never referred to it again.

December 2nd was the dawn of the storm. For eight tremendous days
the King fought out the decision he had to make. The whole business
took place in a Turneresque sunset of burning publicity. Tension reached
an almost intolerable pitch. The King could decide three ways: (i) he
could give up Mrs. Simpson and keep the throne; (2) he could refuse
to accept Baldwin’s advice, ask his resignation, try to govern with a new
Cabinet, and perhaps be forced into the position of ruling with a “King’s
party”; (3) he could abdicate.

Baldwin says ;

In the last days from that date until now that has been the struggle
in which His Majesty has been engaged. We had many talks discussing
the aspects of this limited problem, the House must realize — ^and it is
difficult to realize — ^that His Majesty is not a boy. He looks so young that
we all thought of him as our Prince, but he is a mature man with a wide
and great experience of life and the world.

He always had before him three motives which he repeated in the
course of conversation at all hours and again and again ; that if he went
he would go with dignity; tliat he would not allow a situation to arise in

THE ABDICATION CRISIS

303

which he could not do that ; and that he wanted to go with as little dis-
turbance to his Ministers and his people as possible.

He wished to go in such circumstances that the succession of his
brother would be made with as little difficulty as possible, and I may
say that any idea to him of what might be called a King's party was
abhorrent.

He stayed down at Belvedere because he said he was not coming to
London while these things were in dispute because of the cheering crowds.
I honor and respect him for the manner in which he behaved at that time.

It is a little difficult for an American to realize with what power
Constitutionalism is intrenched in England, and with what horror the
possibility of a King’s party was greeted by a great majority of the
House of Commons. Parliament is supreme over the King. That principle
has been clear since the Magna Charta, and Charles I paid with his head
for defying it. Many members — ^for instance Winston Churchill —
thought when everything was still hush-hush that the King was being
shabbily treated and presented with an unfair ultimatum, but very few
indeed would have been willing to envisage a royal dictatorship. The
King’s party idea was, moreover, discredited by the type of people who
tried to benefit by it, like Mosely, Lady Houston, and Lord Roth-
ermere.

Mrs. Simpson meantime had fled the torrent. No Dido, no Helen of
Troy, has ever been heroine of a more remarkable adventure. Stealthily,
accompanied by one of the ICing’s trusted friends, she crossed France
by motor-car, and took refuge in the villa of Mr. and Mrs. Rogers in
Cannes. Her behavior during the crisis was impeccable ; it remained so.
She tried, a supreme feat, to appear perfectly natural; she bought
flowers, went out shopping. A doctor and a lawyer flew to visit her in
a fog that grounded regular passenger airplanes. Finally she issued a
statement that for dignity and decency matched any words of any of
the parliamentarians: 'T have throughout the last few weeks . . .
wished to avoid any action or proposal which would have hurt or dam-
aged His Majesty or the throne. Today ... I am willing ... to
withdraw from a situation both unhappy and untenable.”

On December loth the climax came. The lawyers, the officials, and
the comptrollers had got all the unprecedented details straight. Baldwin
and the King were in incessant communication, and the Royal Family
gathered for a last painful farewell dinner. Queen Mary issued a poign-
ant statement. Edward signed the deed of abdication, which was wit-
nessed by his three brothers, and the Duke of York prepared to take

INSIDE EUROPE

304

the throne. In the afternoon Parliament assembled, the Speaker read out
Edward's message, and Baldwin spoke. The crowds, numb with shock
and the conflict of emotions, which had booed the Cabinet a day or so
before, set about somewhat glumly cheering the new King.

On December nth Edward read over the radio his farewell, and
the whole world listened. It was a masterpiece to which a quarter-
century of frustration gave perfect form :

At long last I am able to say a few words of my own. I have never
wanted to withhold anything, but until now it has not been constitu-
tionally possible for me to speak.

A few hours ago I discharged my last duty as King and Emperor.
And now that I have been succeeded by my brother, the Duke of York,
my first words must be to declare my allegiance to him. This I do with
all my heart.

You know the reasons which have impelled me to renounce the throne,
but I want you to understand that in making up my mind I did not
forget the country or the empire which, as Prince of Wales and lately
as King, I have for twenty-five years tried to serve.

But you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impos-
sible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my
duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of
the woman I love.

And I want you to know that the decision I have made has been
mine and mine alone.

This was a thing I had to judge entirely for myself. The other person
most nearly concerned has tried up to the last to persuade me to take
a different course.

I have made this the most serious decision of my life only upon the
single thought of what would, in the end, be best for all.

This decision has been made less difficult for me by the sure knowledge
that my brother, with his long training in the public affairs of this
country and with his fine qualities, will be able to take my place forth-
with without interruption or injury to the life and progress of the
empire, and he has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you
and not bestowed upon me, a happy home with his wife and children.

During these hard days, I have been comforted by Her Majesty,
my mother, and by my family. The Ministers of the Crown and in
particular Mr. Baldwin, the Prime Minister, have always treated me
with full consideration.

There has never been any constitutional difference between me and
them and between me and Parliament. Bred in the constitutional tradi-
tions by my father, I should never have allowed any such issue to arise.

Ever since I was Prince of Wales and later on, when I occupied the
throne, I have been treated with the greatest kindness by all classes of
the people wherever I have lived or journeyed throughout the empire.

THE ABDICATION CRISIS 305

For that I am very grateful. I now quit altogether public affairs and
I lay down my burden.

It may be some time before I return to my native land, but I shall
always follow the fortunes of the British race and empire with pro-
found interest and if, at any time in the future, I can be found of
service to His Majesty in a private station I shall not fail.

And now we all have a new King. I wish him and you, his people,
happiness and prosperity with all my heart.

God bless you all ! God save the king !

It is somewhat shocking incidentally that a country which tradition-*
ally prides itself on free speech and fair play should submit to the stupid
censorship which prevented phonograph records of this speech being
bought anywhere in England. (Of course, the ruling classes, trying
desperately to ‘‘build up” the Duke of York, did everything possible to
bury Edward and his memory at once.)

That night, lonely, Edward left England on a destroyer for France,
and exile in the shadows of the Austrian Wienerwald.

Afterthoughts

The whole stupendous business is full of puzzles, paradoxes, and
contradictions. Contradiction Number One: The person of the King
is so unimportant that the transition from Edward to York proceeds
on the surface with the utmost smoothness ; yet the person of the Queen
is so critically important that it cost Edward the throne.

Another is that the Church of England, which forbade this marriage
on the issue of divorce, was itself founded by Henry VIII in a manner
of speaking, to make divorce possible to a monarch.

Another is that England, above all things, is a “free” country; yet
ruthless censorship of the greatest story of a generation helped Edward
to lose the crown. Incidentally the American press was not so wild as
many people uncritically imagine. No breath of scandal about Mrs.
Simpson was ever printed. She was simply a lady who had had two
husbands. Our papers merely went in for informality and abbreviation,
a form of fondness.

Why did it all have to happen? Old Family Doctor Baldwin said that
growing publicity made him go to the ICing. But everyone who counted
in England had known for at least six months that Mrs. Simpson’s
special position greatly improved the character and happiness of the
Monarch and made him a better King. The issue of censorship is of
great importance. If public opinion had been allowed gradually to form

INSIDE EUROPE

306

a favorable opinion of Mrs. Simpson and her excellent influence on
the King, there might have been very little scandal. If Mrs. Baldwin
had asked her to tea or if Queen Mary had taken her out shopping, the
results might have been very different.

It is quite possible that Mrs. Baldwin had a considerable lot to do
with shaping her husband’s mind.

Of course Edward must have made up his mind very early that he
would absolutely marry Mrs. Simpson. Otherwise the story doesn’t
make sense. He gave up the throne not just for a woman, but for a
wife, which is something quite different.

This brings up another terrific contradiction. Edward did not want
to live a loose life. He could have had plenty of mistresses. But he
wanted marriage and a family. Mr. Baldwin, the moralist, denied him
this. He used a moral position to deny the King a moral solution to
the problem. It was not immorality, but just the opposite, which pro-
voked the Church of England’s wrath.

The case seemingly attaches a stigma to all divorced persons in Eng-
land. Mrs. Simpson’s divorces were strictly conventional and proper.
Her ex-husbands “now living” admire her greatly. Supposing she had
been twice widowed. Would that have made a difference? Suppose both
her ex-husbands had died the next week. Would the whole crisis have
been in vain?

Mr. Baldwin said that no precedent existed for a morganatic mar-
riage. But none existed for an abdication — infinitely more iconoclastic
— of this kind.

The quotation from Laertes in the prime minister’s speech was striking.
Had Mr. Baldwin forgotten how Hamlet ends?

Many people wished the Labour party had not been so glacially “con-
stitutional.” The English constitution permits new precedents. If Mr.
Attlee and his advisers had had more push and sting and farsightedness
they might, from January to October, have got much closer to the King
than they did get; the King was not unsympathetic. If, thoroughly
warm relations having been established, the labor leaders had not been
quite so stick-in-the-muddish over divorce, they might have been in a
position to tell Baldwin that they were willing to go to the country on
the issue. Perhaps the Labour party is too hopelessly bankrupt for revival.
But plenty of observers thought they missed a grand chance for re-
suscitation. Again the business of censorship comes up. The people, the
bulk of them, knew nothing of the crisis until it was splashed into their

THE ABDICATION CRISF

307

faces on December 3rd, and Baldwin certainly never gave them a chance
of expressing an opinion.

I do not think that Baldwin, the Archbishop, the Times, and so on
formed a cabal to squeeze Edward off tlie throne. Things don’t happen
that way m England. Nor was Edward’s visit to Wales more than a
minor embarrassment to the Cabinet. No one important in the ruling
classes wanted an abdication, by choice, even though they might have
been willing to see Edward put in his place rather sharply, perhaps, and
even though they have taken the whole business with almost unseemly
grace.

Baldwin’s speech was an authentic masterpiece. Its strength derived
from the curious Puritan mysticism in his character. Perhaps, though,
he left some things out. Edward’s speech was a masterpiece, too, and
also with great quality of emotion.

If Parliament is going to interfere with the private life of a king —
even a king cursed with inability to love anyone except a woman who
belongs or belonged to some one else — ^then Parliament should be re-
sponsible for his education and upbringing.

The whole thing was a great imperial as well as personal tragedy. Ed-
ward’s position may be tinged with a certain neuroticism, but surely
his abdication represents a tremendous wastage of human material.
And the political consequences must be considerable. At once Mr. De
Valera squeezed out from under with the governor-general’s head.
What are the people in India and Africa and the South Seas going to
think — ^if they get a chance — ^about the value of the crown as a symbol
of imperial unity, when a King in the full spring of his reign tosses
it into the junkpile like a can of soup? The political value of monarchy
is the assurance it gives — or should give — of fixity, dignity, stability,
permanence. This crisis proves that a King, after all, is just a man.

When I was in England there was a good deal of talk about Edward’s
alleged pro-Germanism. Most members of the royal family are not,
perhaps, so much pro-German as anti-French. They are, after all, second-
generation Germans, and the French have always irritated and puzzled
them. I do not think that Edward’s “pro-Germanism” could have be-
come a very important political force. It was based not only on heredity
but upon a sort of good-fellowship feeling, that the Germans had been
treated badly after the war and deserved some sporting aid. The new
King probably had much of the same basic impulse and ideas. So one
might conclude that the shift from Edward to York will not mean much

INSIDE EUROPE

308

difference on this important issue. York, however, is much less a vivid
character than Edward and will doubtless be more under the influence
of his advisers.

Finally, I am curious to hear the Marxist interpretation of all this.
What do the economic determinists say of Mrs. Simpson?

George VI

The Duke of York, who chose the title George VI, began what every-
one profoundly hopes will be a long and very colorless reign. He is
quite unambitious and dutiful, and apparently he did not want the
throne ; the story is that he suggested a regency for his daughter Eliza-
beth, but the Cabinet overruled him. George VI was born in York
Cottage in 1895 and served manfully but without brilliance in the
familiar royal curriculum; he fought in the Navy, went to Cambridge,
and toured the Empire. In 1923 he married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the
daughter of the Earl of Strathmore; thus a Scotswoman is Queen of
England. In 1939 he and the Queen visited the United States.

No one with normal standards ever mentioned it in print, but the
Archbishop of Canterbury saw fit to give it prominence in a radio
broadcast and so there is no harm now in noting that George VI is
afflicted with a stammer. The Archbishop said, ‘When his people listen
to him, they will note an occasional momentary hesitation in his speech.
But he brought it into full control, and to those who hear him it need
cause no sort of embarrassment, for it causes none to him who speaks.”

This was the radio sermon in which Canterbury severely rebuked
Edward — ^after his abdication and departure — “for having sought his
happiness in a manner inconsistent with Christian principles of marriage
and within a social circle whose standards and ways of life are alien
to all the best instincts of his people.” Subsequently the Archbishop of
York spoke similarly if not quite with such vengeful point. The two
speeches provoked bitter reaction. The archbishops, it seemed, after
perfect propriety by everyone in the most difficult circumstances, had
added a vulgar note when it was all over.

In the spring of 1937 Edward and Mrs. Simpson were quietly mar-
ried in France. The tumult died, and people of good heart wished them
well.

Chapter XX

Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill

THE British prime minister, Arthur Neville Chamberlain, is a business
■ man. He personifies something very striking in the politics of Eng-
land — the emergence of the middle trading class to a dominant note in
government. Baldwin, who preceded him, was an iron manufacturer
from the Midlands ; Chamberlain spent all his early years in business. He
is one of the comparatively few British statesmen of eminence who went
neither to Eton nor Harrow, Cambridge nor Oxford. His public school
was Rugby, and he never went to University at all.

1 Shortly after he assumed the prime ministership Chamberlain said,
‘‘Although I cannot boast of the blueness in my veins or of the fame
of my forbears, I am yet prouder of being descended from those re-
spectable tradesmen than if my ancestors had worn shining armor
and carried great swords.*' The new prime minister, unlike so many
of his predecessors, is not an aristocrat; he is not wealthy or socially
ostentatious; he is no student or scholar; he is not a philosopher like
Balfour, or a great classicist like Asquith.

Yet Chamberlain is as British as beef. Back in 1730 the Chamberlains
were malsters in Wiltshire ; the next generation turned to cordwaining
(shoemaking and leather work) and five successive Chamberlains were
cordwainers. No fewer than eleven members of the family have been at
one time or other members of the honorable Cordwainers Company. In
the past fifty years the family developed high political importance, as
everyone knows. Neville is the son of the great Joseph, Gladstone's most
formidable opponent, and half-brother of Austen, who died in 1937 after
a distinguished life in politics.

Neville was bom in Birmingham, which had become the bailiwick of
the Chamberlains, in 1869. Thus he is only two years younger than Lord
Baldwin, who gave up the premiership because, at his age, the strain of
office was too onerous. It is a striking historical curiosity that Neville
should finally reach the highest office in the state, which his father just
missed, rather than Austen, whom Joseph had trained from boyhood for
a political career. Austen twice gave up his chances to be prime minister.

309

310 INSIDE EUROPE

Now Neville, who was destined for a purely business life, takes on the
job.

The dynamic, rugged, almost brutal figure of father Joseph profoundly
influenced Neville’s character. Joseph was one of the great radicals of
British history, and Neville’s preoccupation with housing and social
problems, during his term as minister of health, was certainly an in-
herited characteristic. Joseph was the first modern imperialist, and
Neville seemed to be standing in his shoes at the Imperial Conference in
Ottawa which opened the way to Imperial Preference. Joseph, above all,
fought for a tariff program, and Neville, as chancellor of the exchequer,
reversed British free trade policy after a hundred years and gave Britain
a protective tariff.

Neville began his business career with seven years in the British West
Indies, to take care of his father’s sisal plantations there, sisal being a
sort of hemp. He returned to Birmingham, and in 1911 married Miss
Annie Cole, who has been his inseparable and devoted companion ever
since. She turned him to politics, he says. In 1915, a prosperous business
man, he was chosen Lord Mayor of Birmingham (his father had been
Lord Mayor forty years before) ; he became a national figure for the
first time when the liberal war prime minister, Mr. Lloyd George,
created a post for him as Director of the National Services. Lloyd George
says that he was a failure at it; apparently other ministries cut across his
unmarked sphere of authority, and soon he returned to Birmingham.

He first entered parliament in 1918; he was almost fifty before be-
coming an M P. His rise was rapid, because like Bonar Law and Baldwin
he deserted the Lloyd George coalition, and the conservatives, in the
wilderness, had few competent men. (Austen stayed faithful to Lloyd
George, and thus missed his chance to become leader of the conservative
party.) Neville was chancellor of the exchequer for a brief interval in the
first Baldwin government— he had no time to introduce a budget— and
then minister of health. When Baldwin became prime minister for the
second time in 1924 he offered Chamberlain the exchequer again. ‘‘What
a day !” Chamberlain wrote to Baldwin from Scotland. “Two salmon this
morning, and the offer of the Exchequer in the afternoon !” (For Neville
is a notable and enthusiastic fly-fisherman.)

He turned down the Exchequer, preferring the more modest post of
health minister. He held this iob with one interruption till 1929. His

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 311

by Tories. When the national government was formed he took the ex-
chequer, His budgets were orthodox and parsimonious ; he commanded
the complete confidence of the plutocracy in the City. His outstanding
performance was the introduction of Protection He was accused of
starving the social services ; his defenders applauded his ^‘refusal to be
rattled into with prodigality.*'

His power in cabinet grew and also his reputation in the country;
when it became clear that Baldwin would retire his succession to the
prime ministry was inevitable; for considerable periods in 1935 and 1936
he was, in fact, prime minister in all but name.

Chamberlain is shy rather than stiff, upright and austere, unimagina-
tive, a convinced democrat, without a particle of the ‘‘personality" dis-
tinguishing men like Lloyd George, without a trace of Baldwin's mysti-
cism or Churchill's rhetoric, one who abhors the grandiose. A hard and
conscientious worker, sound in health (except for occasional twinges of
gout), orderly as a blue-print, he seemed to many to be an efficient—
perhaps — ^but completely uninspired war prime minister, when war broke
out in 1939.

He loves gardening, fishing, and nature study; these are his only
relaxations. He is a profound bird lover. He installed a birdbath in the
garden between No. 10 and No. ii Downing Street, and Mrs. Chamber-
lain recounts that each morning at breakfast they watch the blackbirds
bathing. The 1936 report of the Committee of Bird Sanctuaries in Royal
Parks contains three observations by the new prime minister. Walking
through St. James's Park or the Green Park he saw, on February 13
and 14, “large flocks of redwings"; on January 16 and February 17,
“pied wagtails, the bird on the latter date being an unusually dark speci-
men" ; on August i, “a swift crossing the Horse Guards Parade."

During one serious financial crisis he found time to write a letter to
the Times as follows :

“Sir: It may be of interest to record that in walking through St.
James's Park today I noticed a grey wagtail running about on the now
temporarily dry bed of the lake near the dam below the bridge, and occa-
sionally picking small insects out of the cracks in the dam. Probably the
occurrence of this bird in the heart of London has been recorded before,
but I have not previously noted it in the park.

“P.S. For the purpose of removing doubts, as we say in the House of
Commons, I should perhaps add that I mean a grey wagtail and not a
pied,"

INSIDE EUROPE

312

He is exceptionally shy, and his intimate friends are few. Photographs
exist showing him masking his face from news cameras. An odd point is
that reputedly he enjoys singing negro spirituals, which he learned many
years ago in the West Indies. His step-mother, by the way, Mrs. W. H.
Carnegie, is American.

He talks no more than is necessary. In his last budget he gave exactly
forty-five words to the £350,000,000 Exchange Equalization Fund, say-
ing that the fund showed a profit, but that its operation ''must continue
to be wrapped in mystery.’’

During the Leipzig crisis during the Spanish war, when hostilities
were nearly at the point of spreading, Chamberlain appealed to the
House for coolness and caution. Lloyd George jibed at him, "Any fish
can keep a cool head.”

Some one said of him casually once: "Neville? Town-clerk of Bir-
mingham in a lean year !”

And once it was reported: "The trouble with Neville is that he has a
retail mind — ^for wholesale problems.”

Taking Over

Mr. Chamberlain’s cabinet, formed on May 28, 1937, contained few
surprises. Ramsay MacDonald stepped out of politics, and Lord Halifax
took his post as Lord President of the Council. Sir John Simon, leader
of the Liberal Nationals, succeeded Chamberlain as chancellor of the ex-
chequer, and Earl de la Warr, representing National Labor, became
Lord Privy Seal. Ministers like Mr. Eden at the foreign office, the
Marquess of Zetland as secretary for India, W. S. Morrison (a rising
star in the Tory party) as minister for agriculture, Malcolm MacDonald
(Ramsay’s highly able and attractive 36 year old son) as minister for
dominions, stayed in their posts. Sir Samuel Hoare took the Home
office, Mr. Duff-Cooper was transferred to the Admiralty, and Leslie
Hore-Belisha became secretary for war.

Almost at once the new prime minister was confronted with a serious
crisis. His budget included a heavy tax on profits, amounting to roughly
30 per cent on increase of profits as compared with the averages for
I 933 - 35 - The motives behind this tax, known as the "National Defense
Contribution,” were twofold, to check profiteering and to help pay for
Britain’s gigantic rearmament program. It aroused a violent storm. The
stockmarket collapsed, and in a week prices fell almost £500,000,000.
Counsellors from all sides, including even the labor party, begged Cham-
berlain to withdraw the bill; Mr. Churchill brilliantly made it easy for

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 313

him to retreat (Churchill quoted an ironic Disraeli to the effect that '*in
a democratically governed country, it is sometimes necessary to defer to
the opinions of the people’') ; and, with more grace and suppleness than
his opponents believed possible, the new prime minister acquiesced and
introduced a new measure.

Overwhelmingly Chamberlain’s job was to superintend British re-
armament. The armament program was initiated before he became
prime minister, but it became his baby. And a baby of some weight. The
cost of rearmament was estimated at no less than $7,500,000,000 for
three years. Obviously Britain would not lend itself to such a major
operation without good reason. Anyone who chose to look across the
channel or in the Mediterranean saw it. The rearmament program,
stirring the country to its vitals, affecting almost every industry, pro-
viding for the revitalization and requipment of every branch of the
service, including especially the air, became by all odds the most impor-
tant event in recent British history. But Britain did not rearm — enough.

The new prime minister faced an angry and disordered world in his
first months of office. The Spanish war, as we have seen, led to a severe
Mediterranean crisis; British merchantmen were torpedoed by pirate
submarines, and a British destroyer was attacked. Chamberlain wanted
good relations and conciliation with both Germany and Italy He ex-
changed cordial notes with Mussolini. Nevertheless he had to join
France in patrolling the Mediterranean. Concurrently the Germans con-
tinued to kick about, and the Japanese made almost perpetual trouble
following the war in China. Hitler was, of course, the biggest and most
dangerous problem. The ugly year 1938 brought the seizure of Austria,
the Sudeten crisis, and the Munich settlement.

Lord Baldwin

Stanley Baldwin the luckiest of incompetent politicians or the subtlest of
competent statesmen?”

— ^Wickham Steed,

**Mr. Baldwin has the Englishman’s genius for appearing an amateur in a game
in which, in fact, he is a superb professional.”

— Harold J. Laski.

"Dictatorship is like a giant beech-tree— very magnificent to look at in its prime,
but nothing grows underneath it.”

— Stanley Baldwin.

Mr. Baldwin retired from office in 1937 after the coronation of George
VI, became a knight of the garter, and accepted an earldom, amid uni-
versal praise. He had, as we know, surmounted the terrific crisis of

INSIDE EUROPE

Edward's abdication; having deprived the Empire of its monarch, he
departed public life himself. Baldwin's career is one of the most aston-
ishing of modern times. This man was so obscure twenty years ago that
a prominent leader of the conservative party confessed that he didn't
know him by sight when he became prime minister. Baldwin himself
records that a “well-known lady of society" asked one of his friends, “Is
the new prime minister what you would call an educated man ?"

Baldwin was — ^and is— two things: a sort of John Bull, the embodi-
ment of British solidity and substance; and a sort of Scandinavian
mystic, a profound puritan whose strength of character comes partly
from “spiritual" values. He was not an “intellectual"; he was not
strikingly clever or energetic; he groped toward solutions of problems
instead of thinking them out rationally ; he responded to emotion easily,
and he could evoke strong emotion in even British listeners. No one
could shake him from his convictions. “The spiritual home of Stanley
Baldwin," it has been written, “is the last ditch."

Baldwin was born at Bewdley in Worcestershire — ^the constituency
he represented for many years — ^in 1867. His father, Alfred Baldwin,
was chairman of the Great Western Railway and head of Baldwins Ltd.,
one of the great iron works of England ; the Baldwins founded the com-
pany and had operated it for four generations, since the middle eight-
eenth century. Baldwin is a typical Englishman : that is to say, his mother
was of Scotch descent, his father Welsh. His maternal grandfather, a
Wesleyan minister, G. B. Macdonald, was an ardent prohibitionist, who
wrote tracts against alcohol. Of his mother's sisters, one married the
painter Burne-Jones, another Sir Edward Poynter, the architect, and a
third was the mother of Rudyard Kipling. Baldwin and Kipling were
first cousins.

Baldwin has described^ how he failed in the entrance examinations
for the Fourth Form room at Harrow. He was disappointed, but, he
says, “I got over it in subsequent years when I learned that two of the
most distinguished men in public life to-day had shared my fate." One
was F. E. Smith, who later became Lord Birkenhead. Baldwin, remi-
niscing, said that it was the first time he had ever been classed with first-
class brains. This was, of course, an effective retort to the brilliant but
unstable Birkenhead, who had scoffed at Baldwin once, saying his brains
were “second-class." After Harrow Baldwin proceeded to Trinity Col-

^ Perhaps not altogether seriously, he wrote once that one of his early ambitions
was to be a blacksmith.

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 315

lege, Cambridge, where he was thoroughly inconspicuous. “I did noth-
ing at the university,” he records. And in one of his speeches he said,
attribute such faculties as I have to the fact that I did not overstrain
them in youth.” Far cry from Trotsky or Mussolini !

He entered his father’s iron foundry and no record exists of any public
speech or activity for almost twenty years. ‘T lived in a backwater,” he
says. His father died in 1908, vacating the parliamentary seat he had
held since 1892 ; the younger Baldwin, at the age of forty-one, succeeded
to it in a by-election. He waited for four months to make his maiden
speech in the House of Commons ; it was in opposition to the eight-hour
day for miners. He was so little noticed that Hansard, as if detecting no
difference between father and son, called him '‘A. Baldwin” by mistake.
In his first nine years in the House he made only five speeches.

When the Canadian-born statesman, Bonar Law, became chancellor
of the exchequer in 1916 he made Baldwin his parliamentary private
secretary. This, the legend said, was because Bonar Law knew that
Baldwin was too honest to intrigue against him, and not clever enough
to get into trouble. In reality he was suggested to Bonar Law by a Scot-
tish conservative M.P., J. C. C. Davidson, an old friend of Baldwin’s. In
1917 Baldwin was promoted to be financial secretary of the treasury —
the threshold to the cabinet — on Davidson’s recommendation. Bonar
Law, according to Wickham Steed, ^ at first demurred. "'He doubted
whether Baldwin deserved ministerial rank or "carried enough guns’ for
the job.”

After the war occurred the famous incident of the letter to the Times,
wherein Baldwin announced his intention of anonymously donating one-
fifth of his fortune to the state. The letter was signed with the initials
‘"F. S. T.,” and Steed records that Baldwin’s card was enclosed ; but no
one for some time guessed that “F. S. T.” stood for Financial Secretary
of the Treasury, and the editor of the Times kept the secret well. The
letter is of such importance to an understanding of Baldwin’s character
that it should be given in full :

Sir, — It is now a truism to say that in August, 1914, the nation was
face to face with the greatest crisis in her history. She was saved by the
free-will offerings of her people. The best of her men rushed to the
colors ; the best of her women left their homes to spend and be spent ;
the best of her older men worked as they had never worked before, to a
common end, and with a unity and fellowship as new as it was exhilarat-

2 In The Real Stanley Baldwin, an acute and dispassionate study.

INSIDE EUROPE

316

itig. It may be that in four and a half years the ideals of many became
dim, but the spiritual impetus of those early days carried the country
through to the end.

To-day, on the eve of peace, we are faced with another crisis, less obvi-
ous, but none the less searching. The whole country is exhausted. By a
natural reaction, not unlike that which led to the excesses of the Restora-
tion after the reign of the Puritans, all classes are in danger of being
submerged by a wave of extravagance and materialism. It is so easy to
live on borrowed money ; so difficult to realize that you are doing so.

It is so easy to play ; so hard to learn that you cannot play for long
without work. A fool's paradise is only the anteroom to a fool's hell.

How can the nation be made to understand the gravity of the financial
situation; that love of country is better than love of money?

This can only be done by example, and the wealthy classes have to-day
an opportunity for service which can never recur.

They know the danger of the present debt ; they know the weight of it
in the years to come. They know the practical difficulties of a universal
statutory capital levy. Let them impose upon themselves, each as he is
able, a voluntary levy. It should be possible to pay to the Exchequer
within twelve months such a sum as would save the taxpayer fifty mil-
lions a year.

I have been considering this matter for nearly two years, but my mind
moves slowly ; I dislike publicity, and I hoped that some one else might
lead the way. I have made as accurate an estimate as I am able of the
value of my own estate, and have arrived at a total of about £580,000.
I have decided to realize twenty per cent of that amount or, say £120,-
000, which will purchase £150,000 of the new War Loan, and present
it to the Government for cancellation.

I give this portion of my estate as a thankoffering in the firm convic-
tion that never again shall we have such a chance of giving our country
that form of help which is so vital at the present time.

Yours, etc.,

F. S. T.

An unfriendly critic would have to decide for himself what other con-
siderations, if any, beside patriotism, prompted Baldwin to this extraordi-
nary letter. Did he not know that the secret of his identity was bound to
be revealed, with resultant publicity wie noch nie ? Had he not, possibly,
a pang of conscience that Baldwins Ltd., like all similar firms, had
boomed during the war, and was he not protecting himself from the
possibility of a charge by his inner self of profiteering?^

In 1921 Baldwin reached cabinet rank as president of the Board of
Trade ; he was as mute in cabinet as in the Commons. Then in the next

> Very few people followed Baldwin’s lead in surrendering part of their fortunes
tc the treasury. The total realized was less than half a million pounds.

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 317

year the turning-point of his life occurred. The Lloyd George coalition
was breaking up ; the conservative party split on whether or not to con-
tinue support of the prime minister, and Bonar Law and Baldwin led
the dissidents who chose revolt. A meeting was called at the Carlton
Club to consider the position. In an astonishing speech Baldwin helped
to turn the tide against Lloyd George; the Tories withdrew their support
from the government, and Lloyd George has been out of office ever since.

Thus one of the most obscure public men in England brought down
its most celebrated figure through a largely moral and emotional appeal.
The lumbering tortoise tripped the bright sharp fox — and the era of
Versailles was over.

Baldwin became chancellor of the exchequer in the conservative Bonar
Law cabinet that replaced Lloyd George, largely because in the attenu-
ated Tory ranks (Austen Chamberlain, Churchill, Birkenhead, Sir
Robert Horne, stayed out with Lloyd George) no one else was available
for the job. He went to America and, faithful to the conviction that the
Briton pays his bill, negotiated a debt settlement on what in England
were considered extremely onerous terms f Bonar Law, horrified, said
that the agreement would depress the standard of living in England for
a generation.

Bonar Law was too ill to work and early in 1923 resigned. He recom-
mended no one to be his successor, and the King had to decide between
Lord Curzon, the foreign minister, and Baldwin. He chose Baldwin,
both on personal grounds and because labor had become the largest oppo-
sition party, which made it almost impossible for the prime minister to
be in the Lords. Curzon was stunned. ‘‘Not even a public figure,"' he
wailed, referring to Baldwin. “A man of no experience. And of the ut-
most insignificance!" Baldwin received journalists after he had visited
the palace. “I don't need your congratulations," he said, “but your
prayers."

^‘The Methodist MachiuvelW^

Baldwin sees few people nowadays ; Worcestershire and his new house
on Eaton Square circumscribe his life. The chief personal influence on
him is undoubtedly his wife, Lucy. Even if he should want to do so, he
would have small chance of straying from the strict line of non-conform-
ist probity while his wife was at his side. Once at least it was her firm

^And which Baldwin's own chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chandierlain,
ten years later repudiated.

INSIDE EUROPE

318

character which kept him from resigning the headship of the party, when
the attacks of the Press lords had depressed him. The Baldwins’ son,
Oliver, a vigorous socialist, has been a political grief to them.

Baldwin writes all his own speeches ; he is supposed never to read the
newspapers; his favorite reading is (with a dictionary) Thucydides; he
takes no exercise; he smokes a pipe. The pipe has become, of course,
the symbol of his ''personality,” but ten years ago, before the Baldwin
legend grew, caricatures usually portrayed him pipeless. He always has
enjoyed a pipe; now he has to smoke one, and on all occasions.

"The pose of simplicity,” Professor Laski wrote, "which Mr. Baldwin
affects ought to deceive no one; a simple man has never been prime
minister of England. His pigs and his pipe are simply the technique of
propaganda. Like the orchid of Mr. Chamberlain or the ringlets of Dis-
raeli, they create an image which the multitude can remember, and they
give a satisfaction to innumerable followers who believe that a common
interest in pigs and pipes is a permanent basis of political adequacy.”

Most of his life Baldwin has seemed to show bad conscience about the
responsibilities of wealth. He opposed the eight-hour day; but he paid
out of his own pocket the wages of workmen at Baldwins Ltd., during a
post-war stoppage. He is apt to think of industrial management as a
personal responsibility of employer to labor, as a manorial business
within family walls. His government passed the Trade Union Law of
1927, "the first legislation hostile to trade unions in over a century of
British history” ; but his extreme Tory opponents have called him a so-
:ialist. Steed records as characteristic "both of his generosity and his
love of doing good by stealth” a remarkable incident when Baldwin,
tramping in Gloucestershire, overheard two old ladies discussing how
they could scrape enough money together to maintain an asylum for
teeble-minded girls. He collected two hundred dirty one-pound notes,
wrapped them in a bit of old newspaper, and sent them to the ladies with
1 purposely badly written letter as a gift of "a passing vagabond.”

While he was prime minister he had his salary as first lord of the
treasury, $25,000 per year ; but he had to live, he announced, on capital
and borrowings. In May, 1928, he said: "For every shilling I had when
I took office I now have something less than a penny,” and his remark
that he exists on an overdraft has been widely quoted. Yet, according
to the Sunday Express, in 193S held 181,526 ordinary shares in Bald-
wins Ltd., and 37,591 preference shares, which at the market price at the

CHAMBLkLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 319

time were worth roughly $500,000. No one, of course, knows what his
obligations may be. He has no expensive hobbies.

A familiar criticism of Baldwin is that he is lazy. Another is that he is
sly. Another is that he is too supine, too ^‘passive.’* His meekness at
times has been, indeed, astounding. When really aroused, however, he
can make mincemeat of his enemies. Twice he has surmounted major
crises within the party, once when the Press lords sought by every means
fair or foul to deprive him of the leadership; second, a less overtly dra-
matic but inwardly more serious struggle, when Churchill, Lord Salis-
bury, and some of the greatest dignitaries of the party sought to oust
him because of his liberal attitude to India— liberal, at least, compared
to theirs.

He moves slowly ; but he can move. Consider, for instance, his activity
in the abdication crisis, described above. Another item: in November,
1935, he dropped Lord Londonderry from the cabinet, with the result
that the great reception in Londonderry House traditionally given on
the eve of the opening of parliament did not occur. Londonderry had
been severely chivied during the election campaign for a remark he had
made as air minister and which pursued him with ghoulish zest. Re-
ferring to the disarmament conference, he told the House of Lords, ‘T
had the utmost difficulty at that time, amid the public outcry, in preserv-
ing the use of the bombing airplane even on the frontier of the Middle
East and India.''

Baldwin disappointed the hopes of that rare buccaneer Winston
Churchill of inclusion in the cabinet reconstruction of 1935. Churchill's
speeches in the campaign were in his best flamboyant style, and he
pointed vigorously to the peril of German rearmament. But Baldwin,
cautious, knew that however valuable Churchill would be in vitalizing
matters of defense, his presence in the government might be a diplomatic
liability. Baldwin did not want, at that time, to confess to a full-blast
arms policy. Also his majority was so great that he didn't need the sup-
port of Churchill's wing of die-hards. And he was probably jealous of
Churchiirs superior ability.

Baldwin is no backslapper ; he has described his discomfort at the elec-
tioneering expected from him in his first contest and which he erased
from his soul by reading Horace or the Odyssey every evening. He dis-
likes rhetoric ; but he is capable of a good deal of it. He confesses that he
is of a ''somewhat flabby nature," who always "prefers agreement to
disagreement" ; but the Quaker strain in his blood would make him go

320

INSIDE EUROPE

to the stake, he says, rather than give up a principle. Rather enviously
he quotes Seneca to the effect that “a strong man matched with fortune
is a sight for the gods to witness.” And he says, ''Success is not neces-
sarily a matter to which you should devote your whole life.”

Baldwin seldom promises an3^hing unless he is fairly sure he can
make the promise good. This was one source of his power. He is almost
quixotically generous and his loyalty is staunch ; never did he intrude on
Ramsay MacDonald^s prerogatives as prime minister during the first
phase of the National government, although he, Baldwin, held the real
power. His political discernment is vivid ; he was one of the first to seize
on and dramatize the new phase of international relations which accom-
panied Hitler’s rise to power, by his speech stating that Britain’s frontier
had become the Rhine. Finally, he stays put.

One of his early speeches, delivered to the Classical Association in
1926, gives insight to his character:

"I remember many years ago standing on the terrace of a beauti-
ful villa near Florence. It was a September evening, and the valley
below was transfigured in the long horizontal rays of the declining
sun. And then I heard a bell, such a bell as never was on land or
sea, a bell whose every vibration found an echo in my innermost heart.
I said to my hostess, 'That is the most beautiful bell I have ever heard.’
'Yes,’ she replied, 'it is an English bell.’ And so it was. For generations
its sound had gone out over English fields, giving the hours of work and
prayer to English folk from the tower of an English abbey, and then
came the Reformation, and some wise Italian bought the bell . . . and
sent it to the Valley of the Arno, where after four centuries it stirred the
heart of a wandering Englishman and made him sick for home.”

Three Times Prime Minister

His first premiership, in 1923, lasted less than a year; he was feel-
ing his way, with only a slim majority, and decided to go to the coun-
try — ^to the horror of most of his colleagues — on the issue of protection.
The country was not ready for tariffs; he was turned out of office.
It was during this administration that he made the remarkable state-
ment, "Well, having been prime minister will have been an interesting
experience to have had.”

Ramsay MacDonald formed the first Labour government and lasted
only a year ; the Zinoviev letter crushed him and Baldwin returned to
the premiership with a tremendous majority; his first act was to for-
give his enemies in the party, and bring Churchill, Birkenhead, Austen

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 321

Chamberlain back from the wilderness and give them his best port-
folios. He was in office from 1924 to 1929, by which time his majority
had dwindled away; he went to the country on a ‘'Safety First'* slogan —
which was strange politics — ^and was roundly beaten.

The 1924-29 administration has lessons for the student. The prime
minister, who hardly seemed interested enough in his job to keep a
grip on things, succumbed to inertia, to muddle, to bad advice. He
mishandled the coal situation, which is insoluble except on the basis of
nationalization of royalties, and reaped the harvest of the General Strike.
He flirted with a project to “reform** the House of Lords, viz., make it
stronger, so that J. L. Garvin covered acres of space in the Observer
calling his government “Doomed!** His foreign policy was a glowing
list of blunders. His government threw over the Geneva protocol, en-
couraged Mussolini in Albania and Abyssinia, signed the Kellogg Pact
only after weakening it, annoyed the United States by the Anglo-French
naval compromise, and botched the Geneva naval conference so badly
that Lord Cecil resigned in protest.

But when Baldwin became prime minister again in 1935 he had an
immense majority once more. His maneuver in calling an election on
November 14, in the very middle of a grave international crisis when
the people were inevitably bound to support a strong, “safe,** govern-
ment, was called vulgar ; but it was, of course, shrewd politics. And the
results were a great tribute to Baldwin personally. The people were
not voting so much for the Tory party or for the National government ;
they were voting for a man. Then in 1937 after the abdication and
coronation he resigned. He has lived in strict political retirement — ^save
for occasional speeches in the Lords — ever since.

England, he said once, has never sought a second Cromwell. But it
may yearn for other Baldwins.

‘There is not much
butcher.”

The Incomparable Winston
collective security in a flock of sheep on the way to the

—Winston Churchill,

I have mentioned Mr. Churchill often in these pages, and I shall
mention him often again. This is inevitable, since he is the most vital,
pungent, and potentially powerful figure in British public life to-day.
Chamberlain is prime minister. But warfare is a dynamic process, and

INSIDE EUROPE

322

just as Lloyd George replaced Asquith in 1916, so the ineluctable force
of events may eventually push Churchill into Chamberlain’s seat. When
war came in 1939, the nation demanded that Churchill — ^who had been
in the wilderness for ten years — ^be included in the government. And he
became First Lord of the Admiralty, the same position he had held in
1914.

Churchill’s squat figure has Renaissance quality. He is omniverous
for experience; he has a swashbuckling love of life and experiment;
he is basically an artist and at the same time a builder ; he is incredibly
versatile. Like the giants of seventeenth century Italy he can turn his
pliable and powerful fingers to almost anything. He has been a war cor-
respondent, soldier, historian, sportsman, water-color painter, politician,
lecturer, administrator, journalist, and bricklayer. His oratory has stimu-
lated thousands; his politics have maddened, perplexed, or encouraged
millions. He has scarcely been idle five minutes in his life. Two supreme
attributes — energy and abstract talent — emerge to make his character and
career the restless dramatic success they have been.

He is an artist, yes — ^few men write better English prose — ^but also
he is a man of action. Consider the following passage :

‘‘Once again I was on the hard, crisp desert, my horse at a trot. I
had the impression of scattered Dervishes running to and fro in all
directions. Straight before me a man threw himself on the ground. The
reader must remember that I had been trained as a cavalry soldier to
believe that if ever cavalry broke into a mass of infantry, the latter
would be at their mercy. My first idea therefore was that the man was
terrified. But simultaneously I saw the gleam of his curved sword as he
drew it back for a ham-stringing cut. I had room and time enough to
turn my pony out of his reach, and leaning over on the off side I fired
two shots into him at about three yards. As I straightened myself in
the saddle, I saw before me another figure with uplifted sword. I raised
my pistol and fired. So close were we that the pistol itself actually struck
him. Man and sword disappeared below and behind me. ... I pulled
my horse into a walk and looked around again.”

No, this is not a paragraph from an old-time thriller by Henty or
even part of the script of a Hollywood Beau Geste. It is by the Rt. Hon.
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, M.P., P.C., His Britannic Majesty’s
First Lord of the Admiralty. It describes the youthful author’s experi-
ences in the cavalry charge at Omdurman (in 1898), when Kitchener
destroyed the forces of the Khalifa, and is taken from A Roving Com-

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 323

mission, Churchill’s fascinating autobiography of his early years.'’ Pro-
ceed:

“In one respect a cavalry charge is very like ordinary life. So long
as you are all right, firmly in your saddle, your horse in hand, and well
armed, lots of enemies will give you a wide berth. But as soon as you
have lost a stirrup, have a rein cut, have dropped your weapon, are
wounded, or your horse is wounded, then is the moment when from all
quarters enemies rush upon you. ... I pulled my horse up and looked
about me. There was a mass of Dervishes about forty or fifty yards
away on my left ... They seemed wuld with excitement, dancing about
on their feet, shaking their spears up and down. The whole scene seemed
to flicker . . . Where was my troop? Where were the other troops of
the squadron? Within a hundred yards of me I could not see a single
officer or man. . . . What a fool I was to loiter like this in the midst
of the enemy! . . .

“The other three troops of the squadron were reforming close by.
Suddenly in the midst of the troop up sprang a Dervish. How he got
there I do not know. He must have leaped out of some scrub or hole.
All the troopers turned upon him thrusting with their lances; but he
darted to and fro causing for the moment a frantic commotion. Wounded
several times, he staggered towards me raising his spear. I shot him at
less than a yard. He fell on the sand, and lay there dead. How easy to
kill a man ! But I did not worry about it. I found I had fired the whole
magazine of my Mauser pistol, so I f rt in a new clip of ten cartridges
before thinking of anything else.”

Churchiirs blood is not merely blue, but practically purple. He was
born, on November 30, 1874, in Blenheim Castle, the son of Lord
Randolph Churchill and grandson of the seventh Duke of Marlborough.
His mother was, as everyone knows, American; Winston — though on
many occasions he has seemed to dislike things American — is half-
American by birth. His mother, an extraordinarily beautiful and mag-
netic woman, was the daughter of Leonard W. Jerome, a famous New
Yorker of the 6o's and 70's, a part owner of the New York Times and
other newspapers and one of the fathers of American sport and horse-
racing.

So far as I know, no good biography of Winston Churchill exists. His
own books — ^from A Roving Commission straight through the six mas-
sive volumes of The World Crisis and The Aftermath — ^are of course
tantamount to a biography, though we have no detailed record from

® Recently this book has appeared in a new edition, published by Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, New York, 1939. It is my source for much of this account of Churchill's
youth.

INSIDE EUROPE

roughly 1902 to 1911. They are indispensable to the student, and
marvelous reading besides. But I wish that some intelligent modern
biographer with a gift for psychological insight and the patience to read
a million words of documents — ^also one who has not succumbed too
deeply to the post-war disillusion that brings the "debunking** spirit
to everything, including science, theology, and politics — ^would tackle
the formidable job of writing a full critical biography of Winston,
Treasure in limitless profusion awaits him.

The pattern of a man’s career, to an extraordinary degree, is written
in infancy and childhood. No man ever escapes himself, it seems; no
man ever changes himself completely. At birth or before, characteristics
are implanted which are like the metal divisions in cloisonne. Later, the
color, the enamel, is filled in, and the surface texture acquires refinement.
Every man is born with a mental and psychological as well as a physical
skeleton. The bony structure of the mind, the character, is there along
with ribs and jawbone.

Churchill’s childhood is a forecast of his whole career. He lived
dangerously from the earliest times. Who but Winston would have had
concussion of the brain at four and a half, as a result of being thrown
from a donkey? Who but Winston would recall with extreme vividness
— ^as his very first memories, memories of events that took place before
he was five — such things as a Viceroy, "a great black crowd,” proces-
sions of terrorists and revolutionaries, and "scarlet soldiers on horse-
back,” At five, he sees a white stone tower in Dublin, and is told that
Oliver Cromwell blew it up. Winston writes® "I understood definitely
that he (Cromwell) had blown up all sorts of things, and was therefore
a very great man.” From the beginning, he loved conversation, audacity,
experiment, and soldiers.

He adored his mother, one of the most brilliant women of the time;
she was his "fairy princess, a radiant being possessed of limitless riches
and power.” With his father he was never close, though he admired him
passionately. He records that he never had more than "three or four”
really intimate conversations with him. His father died when Winston
was 21, wrecking the son’s hopes that they would work and fight to-
gether in the House of Commons. Winston found his mother an "ardent
ally” when Randolph died. "She was still at forty young, beautiful, and
fascinating. We worked together on even terms, more like brother and
sister than mother and son.”*^

® A Roving Commission, page 2.

^ Ibid , page 62.

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 325

Young Churchiirs scholastic records and achievements should be a
considerable spiritual solace to those young men who, even nowadays,
dislike school and do badly at it. He loathed — ^and to this day loathes —
the Classics ; he found Latin a bore and Greek a useless luxury ; he de-
tested — and still detests — ^mathematics. He was the bottom boy in his
class at Harrow, where he was acutely unhappy ; he failed three times in
the entrance examinations for Sandhurst (the officers training school)
before passing finally after merciless cramming. His father once saw
him, when he was a schoolboy, playing with his 1500 toy soldiers, arrayed
with the utmost flowery precision and exactitude. Lord Randolph asked
him if he would like to go into the army. Winston said, ^‘Yes.” The boy
thought that his father really appreciated his talent for military things.
But, he records. Lord Randolph suggested military life because he didn’t
think he was clever enough for any other career.

(But during his school years Winston showed other qualities. He
learned to like English prose. He learned to stay on horses. He learned
to speak. It is of considerable interest that, even as a boy, he dictated
essays, walking up and down the room, pacing, dictating, exactly as he
paces and dictates now.)

At 23 Winston wrote a novel, called Savrola. It was published and still
exists, but copies are very rare. Its theme was that of a liberal politician
who, in an imaginary Balkan state, attacks and overthrows a conserva-
tive dictatorship — ^to be overthrown in turn by a socialist revolution ! It
is extraordinary that Winston, in 1897, was thinking in such terms. The
climax of the book — another highly revealing psychological detail — ^is
an attempt by a fleet of battleships to force “a sort of Dardanelles” in
order to win final victory over the opponent revolutionaries. Exactly
eighteen years later Winston Churchill conceived the real Dardanelles
campaign, and sent the British fleet to attack the real Dardanelles.

After Sandhurst young Churchill was commissioned in a fashionable
cavalry regiment (much to the distress of his father who had an infantry
regiment picked out), and his life as a soldier began. At once — ^typically
— ^he managed to get leave, and went to Cuba to inspect the rebellion
which led to the Spanish American war. His sympathies were with the
Cubans; he fought however with the Spaniards. On his twenty-first
birthday — ^again typically ! — ^he for the first time in his life heard gunfire.
He returned to England, having won a decoration for bravery, and went
to India with his regiment. Here he spent two exciting years. He played
expert polo, fought in the Mamund valley, learned to like whisky.

INSIDE EUROPE

326

wrote a book about the Malakand Field force, contrived to get work
as a newspaper correspondent at the same time that he was an officer —
something quite unprecedented — ^and by the exercise of every possible
artifice succeeded in joining the Tirah Expeditionary Force that went
into action on the North West frontier.

But at the same time, during those Indian years, Winston — ^no one
ever dreamed of calling him an3d:hing but Winston — ^was learning, not
merely to act, but something more important — ^to think. He became
suddenly aware that he had had a very bad education indeed. So, while
his fellow officers napped in the hot afternoons, he began to read. He
thirsted for books and knowledge as a sponge thirsts for water. His
mother sent him cargoes of books : for the first time in his life, he read
serious books seriously — ever3rthing from Plato to Gibbon and back
again. Having learned to read, he set himself to learn to write. He studied
the art of the English sentence, and found that ‘‘paragraphs must fit on
to one another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.’’ When,
subsequently he returned to England, he determined to go to school
all over again, and sought to enter Oxford ; but he was too old, and Ox-
ford wouldn’t take him.

Then came two experiences in Africa. He joined Kitchener’s expedi-
tion down the Nile and fought at Omdurman. He wrote a book on this
campaign, The River War, which is still its standard history, and then
quit the army. But in 1899 was back in Africa again, this time as a
war correspondent for the London Morning Post, at a very large salary
indeed for those days. He participated in the great adventure of the
armored train (November 15, 1899), and was captured by the Boers.
The man who captured him, by remarkable coincidence, happened to be
a Boer officer named Botha, who in later years rose in South African
politics exactly as did Churchill in British politics ; the two, captor and
prisoner, became the warmest friends. Churchill escaped from confine-
ment at Pretoria by a combination of luck, ingenuity, daring, and intui-
tion. Once more he returned to England. This time he found himself a
national hero.

Already he had stood for parliament once, and had been defeated. He
ran again. And in 1901 — ^he was now twenty-seven years old — ^he be-
came Conservative M.P. for Oldham. Churchill determined to settle
down, and devote his whole life to politics. And he has devoted his whole
life to politics ever since, except for interstices filled with bricklaying,
the study of military science, half a dozen lecture tours, plenty of travel.

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 327

water-color painting, and the writing of nineteen big books. When his
political career began he needed something that had not bothered him
before — money. He was by no means rich, as wealth goes in aristocratic
England. But money had never been an urgent preoccupation. Now he
wanted money. So in five months he proceeded to make $50,000 on a
lecture tour!

Churchill’s career as a politician after 1901 is so well-known that it
scarcely needs repeating. He changed party three times. This is as if,
say, Mr. Roosevelt had begun life as a democrat, spent long years in
office as a republican, and then turned democrat again — again to re-
ceive high office. Winston was a conservative from 1899 to 1906. Then,
disagreeing with his party on Free Trade, he crossed the floor of the
house — ^amidst a blast of objurgation — ^and became a liberal. It was as
a liberal that he participated in the 1914 war cabinet. In 1924 he became
a conservative again, and crossed the floor again. Winston’s great repu-
tation for ‘‘unreliability,” the deepseated antipathy with which both
die-hard Tories and surviving pure liberals held him for years, was not
caused so much by his audacity, or even his reputation for “cleverness,”
but because he had so signally changed his party spots, deserted his
party line.

Churchill’s first cabinet post came early. He was president of the
Board of Trade in 1908, when he was only 34. He became Home Secre-
tary in 1910, and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, which post he
held till 1915. Asquith chose him for the Admiralty because, in the
growing international storm, his energy and fruitfulness were necessary
to revitalize the Fleet. Churchill developed battleships of the Queen
Elizabeth class and had the fleet mobilized for instant action when war
came. It is hopelessly unsatisfactory to attempt even to mention the
drama, the excitement, the spectacular crowded activity, of Churchill’s
Great War years. One must read his own World Crisis, Even to sum-
marize briefly such episodes as the Antwerp and the Dardanelles ex-
peditions would take pages.

When the Dardanelles campaign failed he resigned from the govern-
ment almost in disgrace — ^though the failure was not his fault — and went
to France as an active infantry officer. Lloyd George brought him back
in 1917 as Minister of Munitions. Then he served in turn as war
minister, air minister, and secretary for the colonies. Again, these years,
crammed and packed with events, bursting with decisive action, cannot
be part of my story here. They are in the history books. Churchill was

INSIDE EUROPE

328

a major force in settling the Irish question; humanely, he sought to lift
the blockade of Germany; he promoted allied intervention in Russia;
he '^invented” the country of Transjordan. In 1924 he became chancellor
of the exchequer — ^the boy who could not understand mathematics! —
under Baldwin in calmer days, and held this post until 1929. He went out
when Labour came in, and the ensuing National government would not
have him. For ten years he retired into the wilderness. But it was a
wilderness which he tidied and cultivated neatly. He wrote his books,
worked over his ideas, learned to relax — 3, little — ^and improved his mind.

During the ten years 1929-39 Churchill — ^who was becoming grayer,
stouter, solider — ^remained, of course, a Member of Parliament. He
became the leader of a small dissident band of last-ditch imperialists who
bitterly, for long years, fought Baldwin’s quasi-liberal India bill. Then
in about 1933, from his lonely and isolated corner seat, Churchill turned
into the great Cassandra. He — ^almost alone among British politicians —
sensed the peril to Britain in the rise of Hitler. For six years, day in,
day out, he spoke, wrote, argued, exhorted, about Hitler’s dangerousness,
exploring especially every phase of German rearmament. Few paid
him much attention. But gradually his hammering voice became heard.
His two compilations of speeches and articles in the middle 30’s, Arms
and the Covenant and Step by Step, are outstanding examples of political
realism and prescience.

Then when war came, in September 1939, Prime Minister Chamber-
lain accepted the inevitable, and Churchill reentered the cabinet.

To-day, at sixty-five, Churchill looks at least ten years younger than
he is. And, of course, considering the tradition of venerableness in British
politics — ^and considering his great vitality — sixty-five is mere baby-
hood. His cheeks are a clear child’s pink, his sparse reddish hair is
curly at the edges. He has extremely pale but very bright blue eyes.
His manner, receiving someone, is at first deliberate. Those very bright
eyes survey the visitor with a curious mixture of patience, reserved
amusement, and curiosity. When Churchill begins to talk, with an odd
clucking intonation, the words roll and bounce. He chooses words, even
in conversation, as a lapidary sets gems. He loves rhetoric, and is a
formidable phrase maker. In a forty minute talk I had with him, he used
at least one word I had never heard aloud before, “marplot,” and in-
vented one phrase — ^“a mystery inside a mystery inside a mystery” — ^that

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 329

he later elaborated in a radio address. His talk is so good, so full of
balance and antithesis, and so incredibly fluent, that one longs for a
secret dictaphone to take it down.

But Mr. Churchill can listen too. And good listening is, in a way, the
basis of good conversation. He asks more questions than he answers.

As to his inveterate habit of rhetoric — ^in writing as well as speech —
consider the famous and perhaps too purple passage about Lenin from
The Aftermath'?

'implacable vengeance, rising from a frozen pity in a tranquil, sensible,
matter-of-fact, good-humored integument ! His weapon logic ; his mood
opportunist. His sympathies cold and wide as the Arctic Ocean; his
hatreds tight as the hangman’s noose. His purpose to save the world:
his method to blow it up . . . but a good husWd ; a gentle guest ; happy,
his biographers assure us, to wash up the dishes or dandle the baby;
as mildly amused to stalk a capercailzie as to butcher an Emperor . . .
Confronted with the need of killing any particular person he showed
reluctance — even distress. But to blot out a million, to proscribe entire
classes . . — ^these were sublime abstractions. . . .

"Lenin was the Grand Repudiator. He repudiated everything. He
repudiated God, King, Country, morals, treaties, debts, rents, interest,
the laws and customs of centuries, all contracts written or implied, the
whole structure — such as it is — of human society. In the end he repu-
diated himself . . . He alone could have led Russia into the enchanted
quagmire ; he alone could have found the way back to the causeway. He
saw ; he turned ; he perished. The strong illuminant that guided him was
cut off at the moment when he had turned resolutely for home. The
Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune
was his birth : their next worse — his death.’’

His wit and irony, rather heavy sometimes are famous. Once he
called Chamberlain "that undertaker from Birmingham.” Once he wrote
a letter to the Times in answer to Lord Hugh Cecil, who had been de-
nouncing Italy, France, Japan, Soviet Russia, and Germany with equal
firmness. Winston wrote, "It must be very painful to a man of Lord
Hugh Cecil’s natural benevolence and human charity to find so many of
God’s children wandering simultaneously so far astray . . Then
he points out that the French don’t deserve as much censure as the others.
He concludes, "In these circumstances I would venture to suggest to
my noble friend, whose gifts and virtues I have all my life admired, that
some further refinement is needed in the catholicity of his condemna-
tions.”®

® Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

® London Times, May 12, 1936.

INSIDE EUROPE

330

In December 1937, during a debate on non-intervention in Spain, Mr.
Churchill had good fun with Mussolini. The British and French had
lecently managed to check activity by pirate (Italian) submarines in the
Mediterranean. The Italians then decided to join the piracy control.
Mr. Churchill said, as reported by the Times (December 22, 1937) :

'‘In this connection he (Mr. Churchill) must pay his tribute to Signor
Mussolini, who joined the common exertions of the Mediterranean
powers — (laughter) and whose prestige and authority by the mere terror
of his name quelled the wicked depradations of these pirates. (Loud
laughter.) Since the days of Caesar himself there has been no more salu*
tary clearance of pirates from the Mediterranean. ( Laughter. )’"

One of the most delightful of Mr. Churchill’s ironical sallies came
many years ago, when he discovered — just as he himself w^as becoming
a well known author — that an American novelist, the author of Richard
Carvel, Comston, and so on, also bore the name Winston Churchill. He
wrote to his namesake as follows :

London,

June 7, 1899.

^'Mr. Winston Churchill presents his compliments to Mr. Winston
Churchill, and begs to draw his attention to a matter which concerns
them both. He has learnt from the Press notices that Mr. Winston
Churchill proposes to bring out another novel, entitled Richard Carvel
. . . Mr. Winston Churchill is also the author of a novel now being
published in serial form ... He has no doubt that Mr. Winston
Churchill will recognize from this letter — if indeed by no other means —
that there is grave danger of his works being mistaken for those of Mr.
Winston Churchill. He feels sure that Mr. Winston Churchill desires
this as little as he does himself. In future to avoid mistakes as far as
possible, Mr. Winston Churchill has decided to sign all published articles,
stories, or other works, "Winston Spencer Churchill,’ and not "Winston
Churchiir as formerly. He trusts that this arrangement will commend
itself to Mr. Winston Churchill, and he ventures to suggest . . . that
both Mr. Winston Churchill and Mr. Winston Churchill should insert
a short note in their respective publications explaining to the public which
are the works of Mr. Winston Churchill and which those of Mr. Winston
Churchill . .

Mr. Winston Churchill, the American, replied in kind, with equal grace
and charm.

Sir Edward Marsh, w’ho was for many years Churchill’s private secre-
tary, tells in his engaging memoirs, A Number oj People, a good many

A Rovtng Commission, pages 217-8.

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 331

Churchill anecdotes. Once Wedgwood Benn, a small man, rose in the
Commons and spluttered with indignation at something Winston had
said. Churchill replied, Right Honorable Friend should not develop
more indignation than he can contain.’' Once he almost missed a train.
Mrs. Churchill was alarmed. But Marsh simply remarked, ‘*\\"inston is
such a sportsman, he always gives the train a chance to get away.” Once
Marsh accompanied him on an election campaign in the Midlands.
W^inston walked out in the slums. “ ^Fancy,’ he said, living in one of
these streets never seeing anything beautiful — ^never eating anything
savory — never saying anything clever!* ”

Churchill s attitudes are, indeed, sometimes juvenile. He has once or
twice been somewhat ridiculous, for instance when he summoned
artillery — ^way back in 1911 — ^to blast some miserable anarchists out of
a house in Whitechapel. For years— not now— it seemed that he stood
always on the wrong side of great social issues. He w^as against the suf-
fragists. He was against a liberal constitution for India. He was against
every shade and aspect of even the very mild brand of socialism advo-
cated by the British Labour party. He was against the working classes.
During the General Strike, when he edited the official government
newspaper, he behaved like a schoolboy. In 1919 — as if the world were not
sufficiently exhausted by war — ^he was the moving spirit behind the
utterly useless and disastrous intervention of the allies in Russia.

Sometimes, when one inspects his leading political ideas, one feels
that they are the ideas of an incredibly talented, willful, badly educated
child. He seems planted in the nineteenth century, while the world has
moved on. For years, he adored warfare. He blamed ‘'democracy” for
taking the fun, the style, the glamour out of war. He writes of the
Mamund campaign, “Sir Bindon sent orders that we were to stay in
the Mamund valley and lay it waste with fire and sword in vengeance.
This accordingly we did.” He is a convinced constitutionalist and demo-
crat, but elections have at times bored him. He wrote in A Roving
Commission : “I have fought up to the present fourteen contested elec-
tions, which take about a month of one’s life apiece. It is melancholy,
when one reflects upon our brief span, to think that no less than four-
teen months of life have been passed in this wearing clatter.”

Winston has an estate, Chartwell, in Kent, 20 miles from London
where he likes to spend most of his time. He has built pools, gardens,
brick walls, fences, and several small structures with his own hands.
For years his favorite exercise was bricklaying; for a time he belonged

INSIDE EUROPE

332

to the bricklayers trade union, though his hatred of socialists was fero-
cious. He wears blue overalls, smokes his inevitable long dark cigar,
hunches himself before the wall, mixes the mortar, slaps the bricks into
place. For relaxation he paints. There have been several exhibitions of
his work, for which he uses the name Charles Morin.

Churchill’s health is good — ^though for years he suffered from a dis-
located shoulder incurred in an accident in India — and his stamina is
sufficient for his task. He records that by taking a short nap every after-
noon, he can increase his working day by two hours. He is something
of a sybarite in food and drink; he loves the good things of life. Lord
Birkenhead once said of him, ‘Tt is simple to satisfy Winston ; he demands
only the best.” The best things cost money, and thus he works so hard.
His income as journalist and lecturer probably averages $100,000 per
year. Of this he spends plenty.

He has a very warm family sense ; years ago he married Miss Clemen-
tine Ogilvy Hozier, and their life has been very happy. She was — ^and is
— ^an exceptionally beautiful and talented woman. They have one son
and three daughters. The son, Randolph, has already had a stormy
career in politics — ^he fought several by-elections unsuccessfully — ^and
journalism. Until war broke out, he wrote the Londoners Diary in the
Evening Standard; when war came, he joined up. One of the Churchill
daughters, Sarah, an actress, married an American actor, Vic Oliver.
Another married a rising young M.P., Duncan Sandys.

When one attempts to list Churchiirs qualities and the sources of his
power, the first item to come to mind is, perhaps, imagination. For in-
stance, he was largely responsible for the evolution of the tank, which
revolutionized modern warfare and helped enable the allies to break the
deadlock in the west in 1918. Associated with his brilliantly fertile imagi-
nation is the quality of foresight. He was not only the first British poli-
tician to appraise correctly Hitler’s power ; he was the first to see that
this made big-scale British rearmament inevitable, and from the earliest
days he appealed for it.

Another source of power is his pertinacity. His powerful, stocky body
with the very big head bears a not unreasonable resemblance to that of
a bulldog. His escapades seeking permission to join Kitchener ^s force in
Africa, when every obstacle — ^including Kitchener’s own acute personal
distaste — confronted him, when he was repeatedly checked and rebuffed,
are an early case in point. Nothing could stop him in his almost comically
stubborn and dogged determination to get what he wanted. As to his

CHAMBERLAIN, BALDWIN, CHURCHILL 333

courage, it has never been questioned. Once, when a boy, he spent three
months in bed, as a result of injuries suffered when he jumped 30 feet
off a bridge, in order to avoid capture in a game of hide and seek.

His energy, too, is prodigious. On finishing his huge life of Marlbor-
ough, he plunged at once into a long history of the Anglo-Saxon peo-
ples, though he was continuing his ordinary work in parliament and
politics. He is willing to do any kind of spade work. For years, because he
was afraid he did not speak fluently, he committed to memory every
speech he delivered. Hard work — ^as well as a natural genius for lan-
guage — contributed to his present almost excessively accomplished ora-
tory.

Again, his political realism has always been acute. He could see funda-
mentals, even if they were distasteful. After the occupation of Prague, for
instance, in 1939, he would instantly have made a pact with Russia, on
almost any terms, despite his hatred of the Bolsheviks. His first radio
speech to the people of America, in October, 1939, was a masterpiece of
political acumen, though he did inadvertently offend some Americans in
the south by his innocent enough peroration about the Civil War.

Finally, he is a supreme and sagacious individualist. He wrote once
that he always had a tendency ‘'to swim against the stream.”

When I saw Mr. Churchill shortly after the outbreak of war in Sep-
tember, 1939 it was understood that I would not, of course, quote him.
But there can be no harm in saying that I asked him two main questions.
First, How does the war of 1939 differ from that of 1914? Second,
How strong are the allies vis-a-vis the Germans ? Mr. Churchill’s answers
were vivid, perspicacious, and confident in the extreme.

Behind his desk in the great Admiralty room is a large chart inside a
folding wooden frame. Mr. Churchill explained that he had ordered this
chart to be constructed in 1911, when he first took charge of the Ad-
miralty, so that he could see every day the position of every German
battleship. When he returned to office in 1939, the first thing he did was to
see if that old chart was still there. It was. And no one had looked at it
in twenty years.

One thing about Churchill is unique. He is the only top rank cabinet
officer or leader on either side during the last war who survives to hold
important office to-day.

Chdpter XXI
Men of Whitehall

The Debacle of MacDonald

What we have to do is to pile up and pile up and pile up
the income of the industry in this way and that way and
the other way,

— Mr. MacDonald, quoted in the Manchester Guardian

Because thou art neither cold nor hot will I spew thee out
of my mouth,

— Quoted at Seaham Harbour by Lady Houston

J AMES RAMSAY (‘‘Judas Iscariot^O MACDONALD, the creator
and the destroyer of the Labour party, despicable or heroic as you
choose, a man of Olympian or Stygian loneliness, was born in Scot-
land in 1866 of obscure parentage. It is never, of course, mentioned in
the British Press these days or even in polite conversation; but dur-
ing the war, when MacDonald was a devil to patriots, the allegation
that he was illegitimate was printed. The fact of his humble origin has
been of profound psychological importance in his career. All his life
he sought compensation for the miserable poverty of his boyhood. When,
according to Philip Snowden, he became prime minister of the Na-
tional government and chuckled, “To-morrow every duchess in Lon-
don will be wanting to kiss me,'’ he was no more than finally squaring
the accounts of his arduous and unhappy youth.

The record of his career until and during the war was conspicuously
honorable. He left school in Scotland when he was fourteen to earn
a living; penniless in London, he found a job in a warehouse, working
as a clerk for 12s. 6d. a week; he studied science and economics at
night. On August 3, 1914, he had courage enough to stand up against
the whole House of Commons and denounce the war. He seemingly
ruined his political career ; extreme Tories like the late Lady Houston,
in the Saturday Review, continued for years to print the socialist mani-

334

MEN OF WHITEHALL

335

festo, which he prominently signed, urging support of the Russian revo-
lution in 1917* During the war a ship’s company threatened to strike
rather than carry MacDonald, a militant pacifist, to the Stockholm peace
congress. He was forced to resign from his golf club at Lossiemouth ;
his meetings had to be protected by the police. And, be it noted, in those
days the bulk of the socialist party deserted him.

Twice MacDonald owed great good fortune to chance. In 1900, the
story goes, “Mr. James R. MacDonald” was elected secretary of the
newly formed labor representative committee, which later became the
Labour party. But many of the delegates, according to the Daily Herald,
were under the impression that they were voting for a different Mac-
Donald — one Jimmie MacDonald, a prominent member of the London
trades union council. The name proposed was J. MacDonald. Two
J. MacDonalds were present. Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald won.

More than half a generation later, in 1922, he was elected leader
of the party in parliament by a majority of two over J. R. Clynes,
and thus, as leader of the opposition, he automatically became prime
minister the next year. The Clydesiders, radicals from Glasgow, sup-
ported him because they thought he would undertake a genuinely Left
policy. He was, indeed, when he first reached the premiership, a pic-
turesque and challenging personality. His rich Scottish eloquence, h^s
instinctive air of leadership, his poise and parliamentary skill, his un-
doubted courage and facility in negotiation, made him — ^the first labot
prime minister in British history — 3, world figure.

But even within his own party, even in the early days, MacDonald
was not popular. “He was never,” Robert Bernays wrote,^ “at ease m
the world he had conquered.” Inordinately proud and vain, he walled
himself off from his subordinates ; the story is told that he never spoke
even to Arthur Henderson, his worthy second in command, except in
cabinet. Like Woodrow Wilson he could not bear criticism. And his
followers began to complain of his “insufferable superiority.”

One of his fellow ministers wrote, “The Prime Minister was not
in a mood to find time or energy for that friendly social intercourse
with the members of his own party or even with his ministerial col-
leagues, which goes so far to avert friction and produce the team spirit.
More and more he tended to spend his leisure in less disagreeable so-
ciety.” One story, possibly apocryphal, is that he once eluded his Labour
party supporters and sank into an armchair at Londonderry House,
Great Cemtemporartes, p. 260.

INSIDE EUROPE

336

saying, “I cannot tell you what balm of soul it is to escape from my
colleagues into the company of civilized people/'

MacDonald, born without much sense of humor, a creature of angu-
lar and obstinate desires, with a highly oblique vision of his fellow men,
full of Scotch mists and tempests, required, above all, adoration. And
adoration was hardly the emotion he could inspire in his hard-headed
and individualist colleagues. His wife, whom he had worshiped, died
in 1911; he was an extremely lonely man. It was inevitable that he
should turn to '‘society." He was "taken up" by people like the Lon-
donderrys, and few things mattered to him more than lionization.

Lady Londonderry was a great influence on his life, and as the first
hostess in London she helped his career enormously, especially when
he was prime minister in the National government. Jimmie Maxton,
the I.L.P. leader, once asked in the House of Commons if MacDonald
had decided to "abandon the Red Flag in favor of the Londonderry
Air?" (an Irish tune). In Geneva in 1933 newspaper correspondents
organized a luncheon in his honor ; he asked at the last moment where
Lady Londonderry was to sit, and even when told that it was a stag
affair he refused to attend unless she should be invited also.

He became capable of profound ridiculousness. In 1929, en route to
visit the United States, he is said to have wirelessed London for advice
as to what he, the first socialist prime minister, should wear at the re-
ception. The Foreign Office, terrified that he might step off the boat
in a deerstalker hat or leather stockings or something else he would
consider appropriate, wirelessed back that a top hat and morning coat
would see him through.

In I 93 S> after the Stresa conference and when he was prime min-
ister in the National government, he warmly shocked a group of quite
friendly journalists by asking them to leave the public restaurant-car
until he had concluded his dinner. Everybody was hungry, but Ramsay,
rolling toward Geneva, wanted to be alone.

A "National” government is a convenient device by which the lead-
ing party exploits a crisis by giving other parties representation in
the cabinet, but on disadvantageous terms. Its result is permanently to
split and weaken the opposition; it rubs down party lines, but main-
tains the pretense of comprehensive party support. MacDonald became
prime minister in the first National government in 1931. Possibly he
thought that his labor colleagues would follow him in toto. Probably
he didn't much care if they did or not. They didn't.

MEN OF WHITEHALL

337

The financial crisis of 193^ was caused, basically, by the shrinkage
of British exports and the decline of British shipping and overseas
investments. The City of London had borrowed money on short-term,
and lent it on long-term ; it made money by paying three per cent on
loans from France, and receiving six per cent from Germany. This
process was a happy one until Germany, caught by the crisis, could
not repay; London found itself with only £55,000,000 in gold, and
with £250,000,000 in immediate outstanding liabilities. The London
bankers might, they thought, save themselves by a loan from New
York, but Wall Street refused to advance credit until the British
budget, swollen by perfectly legitimate expenses of the social services
and the famous but misnamed ‘‘Dole,'’ should be balanced. MacDonald
went to the country on a promise to stick to gold and clean house. Cam-
paigning, he descended to un-Bntish demagoguery by exhibiting Ger-
man banknotes of the inflation period, and threatening that presently
a million British pounds would not suffice to buy a postage stamp.
The country, frightened, gave him immense support. And then the
cabinet was forced to do just what MacDonald had sworn it never would
do. Britain devaluated her currency.

The National government, of which Baldwin and not MacDonald
soon became the leading power, helped to kill the disarmament con-
ference and it repudiated the American debt ; the World Economic Con-
ference held under its auspices in London in 1933 was a grisly failure.
On the other hand, it revolutionized British tariff policy by introducing
protection, which stimulated industrial recovery; it converted 2,000 mil-
lion pounds of War Loan bonds from five to three and a half per cent ;
and it inaugurated a sort of empire customs union by the Ottawa agree-
ments, after the Empire had, by the Statute of Westminster, been given
the technical right of secession.

Midway in his administration MacDonald’s health began to fail. His
eyesight troubled him, and he became seriously ill; when he went to
Geneva in 1933 his physician had to accompany him and oversee his
every step. An extraordinary incident occurred when the Press lords
were attacking him on the grounds of inefficiency caused by the col-
lapse of his health. The prime minister summoned some of the par-
liamentary reporters and himself gave them a typewritten statement
denying that he was seriously ill, and saying that he was merely suffer--
ing from “loss of memory.” Naturally, patriotic editors took care tr
suppress the announcement.

INSIDE EUROPE

338

At about this time an incredible and frightful woolliness became notice-
able in his public utterances.

Regarding unemployment, he described the problem to the House
of Commons as follows:

‘‘Schemes must be devised, policies must be devised if it is humanly
possible to take that section (i.e , those unemployed who are unlikely
shortly to be reabsorbed into industry) and to regard them not as
wastrels, not as hopeless people, but as people for whom occupation
must be provided somehow or other, and that occupation, although it
may not be in the regular factory or in organized large-scale industrial
groups, nevertheless will be quite as effective for themselves mentally,
morally, spiritually and physically than, perhaps, if they were included
in this enormous mechanism of humanity which is not always produc-
ing the best result, and which, to a very large extent, fails in producing
the good results that so many of us expect to see from a higher civili-
zation based upon national wealth.

“That is a problem that has got to be faced.''

Regarding disarmament, he told the general committee of the dis-
armament conference the following:

“You are faced with the problem of what to do in respect to this
question, to that question, and to the other question, but perfectly
obviously, after you have faced the more superficial aspects of the
separate questions, you want to know in relation to a complete plan
what you are actually giving and what you are actually getting. There-
fore, when the departmental, or compartmental, exploration has gone
on to a certain extent it cannot be finished until somebody, co-ordinat-
ing all your problems, sets out in one statement and declaration the
complete scheme that this Conference can pass in order to give se-
curity, to give disarmament, to give hope for the future — ^until that
scheme has been placed before you, you cannot complete your ex-
amination of compartmental problems and questions. . .

Lady Astor asked him in the House if he would consider appointing
a woman to the front bench. He replied :

“I should be very glad not only to have one in the administration,
but half a dozen, and if my Noble Friend will find that there are not
quite so many, or even perhaps worse than that, I, having made that
statement to her and given her that assurance, am perfectly certain she
will not blame me for the result.”

During one of his speeches at this time one of his friends, watch-
ing from the peers' gallery, noticed that the prime minister constantly

MEN OF WHITEHALL

339

interrupted himself to look anxiously over his shoulder like a man
pursued.

‘‘Weren't you feeling well when you were speaking? Why did you
keep looking over your shoulder that way?” his friend asked.

‘T had the impression,” MacDonald replied, “that there was a man
in the gallery who was going to shoot me in the back.”

He constantly complained of fatigue and overwork, but members of
the staff said that he spent much of his time staring into the fire at
Downing Street, refusing to read essential papers and reports. While
he was foreign minister, on the other hand, a member of the foreign
office said, “He is the easiest minister I ever had to manage.” When
members of the German delegation arrived in London to discuss the
Dawes plan, on which the fate of their country depended, MacDonald
shocked them by saying in his opening speech that the conference
should be concluded within three days, as he had to go to Lossiemouth
to rest.

He had, it seemed, no direct feelings about things ; only about him-
self in relation to things. Mr. Churchill once called MacDonald “the
boneless wonder”; the prime minister, he said, possessed the “gift of
compressing the maximum of words into the minimum of thought.”

MacDonald had, it goes without saying, lost all discernible traces of
socialism. He was howled down by his former colleagues, during the
Means Test^ debate, as “a mountebank” and “a swine,” “a low, dirty
cur who ought to be whipped out of public life.”® He spent his time
alone, brooding, or in the parlors of the rich. At a public dinner he
once excused himself with the remark, “I am sorry to leave this con-
genial company, but I must preside at a Coal committee.” And the wits
said, “Ramsay has finally succeeded in nationalizing something— the
government.”

One sentiment is to his credit; in the spring of 1935 he took a
strong line against Hitler; he realized how dangerous Germany was
becoming. But apparently it was not only the persecution of pacifists
or socialists like (theoretically) himself in Germany which turned him

2 The Means Test is the inspection for eligibility of the unemployed to assistance
after the insured “Dole” period The family is considered as a unit If a son or
daughter earns a lucky shilling, this is taken off the father's allowance. The result
was to drive young people away from their families in thousands of homes. The
new regulations in 1934, moreover, reduced the amount of benefit

^ The lordly London Times dismissed the scene in a brief paragraph saying that
a member was moved to “passionate personal abuse” of the prime minister.

34 ^

INSIDE EUROPE

against the Nazis, but — a more or less emotional consideration — ^the
fact that the German government had executed two handsome and
aristocratic women spies.

In November, 1935, MacDonald was beaten for rejection at Sea-
ham — ^to the relief of some millions of his countrymen. He had already
given way to Baldwin as prime minister. A lonely and almost forgotten
figure, he died suddenly in 1937.

Hoare

Rather arch, rather delicate, bookish, fond of sports like ice-skating,
Sir Samuel Hoare, the Lord Privy Seal in the 1939 war cabinet, gives
an impression of primness which his inner character belies. He was an
active air minister ; he flew twice to India and back. As secretary of state
for India he wrote the India bill, the longest in the history of the British
parliament; with supernal industry he answered 15,000 questions about
it, made 600 speeches, read 25,000 pages of reports, and participated in
a debate which lasted seven and a half years and comprised 15,500,000
words in Hansard which is equivalent to twenty books the size of the
English Bible.

Moreover, during most of this labor, his chief antagonist was Win-
ston Churchill, the most accomplished and tenacious debater in the
House of Commons.

Hoare became foreign minister in June, 1935, partly because Bald-
win knew his abilities, partly as reward for his prodigious Indian labors.
The bill itself, a typically Baldwin measure, was a middle-of-the-road
affair. It outraged Indian nationalists and die-hard Tories both, by ex-
tending a measure of self-government to Indian while retaining the
essentials of British control.

Mr. Gandhi liked Hoare, because, as he said, Hoare said No when
he meant No, instead of evading direct statement with pious platitudes,
as MacDonald did. The great Indian leader once told Lord Halifax, then
viceroy as Lord Irwin, whom he deeply admired despite their political
antagonism, “You know, I trust that man Hoare as I do you’' — ^which
was as high a compliment as existed in Gandhi’s vocabulary.

Hoare comes from an old banking family. He learned rudimentary
Russian (his teachers were the translators to the then Imperial Rus-
sian Embassy in London and the cantor of the Orthodox Church),
and went to Russia during the war, as a member of the British In-
telligence Service. He was so expert at his job that — as he himself

MEN OF WHITEHALL 341

revealed in a speech in 1933— the Tsar accused him of foreknowl-
edge of the murder of Rasputin. Hoare left Russia in February, 1917,
and went to Italy with Lord Milner, as a general staff officer. After
the war he spent some time in Czechoslovakia and he has been presi-
dent of the Anglo-Czech Society in London. Meantime, he has unin-
terruptedly been a conservative M.P. for Chelsea since 1910.

Hoare’s literary affiliations with France are close. I read in the
Evening Standard recently that his wife’s grandaunt, Aimee de Coigny,
inspired Andre Chenier’s La Jeune Captive, Like the former permanent
under-secretary. Sir Robert Vansittart, he is widely read in French
literature, and he speaks French well. He mildly startled the House of
Commons in October, 1935, by being the first foreign minister ever
to (juote Marcel Proust there. Emotionally, Hoare is very much closer
to the French than to the Germans ; and considerations like these are apt
to play a certain role in policy.

We have noted Hoare’s part in the Abyssinian negotiations, and how
the Hoare-Laval plan — only temporarily — ^ruined him. Obviously he
had been made a scapegoat, and within six months after retiring as
foreign minister he was back in the government in charge of the ad-
miralty, an equally important job. One footnote to the affair caused
titters. Explaining the Abyssinian business to his constituents in Chel-
sea, in February, he defended himself for having gone to Paris to
meet the wily Laval. He didn’t want to go, he said, but the British
ambassador in Paris pressed him to break his journey to Switzerland
for the visit. ‘T could not refuse,” Sir Samuel’s letter read, *%ough
it meant separating myself from Lady Maud and the luggage.”

Hoare is often spoken of as the next prime minister, when Neville
Chamberlain some day retires.

Eden for One

No one need go far in seeking the sources of Anthony Eden’s sin-
cerity in the cause of peace. Two of his brothers were killed in the
War, Edward, the eldest son of the family, in France, and the young-
est, William Nicholas, who, a midshipman at Jutland, perished at
sixteen.

Eden, one of the most attractive figures in world politics to-day, who
succeeded Hoare as foreign minister, was bom in 1897, His mother
was a famous society beauty, his father, Sir William Eden, a terrify-
ingly ‘‘county” baronet who, interested also in art, once quarreled

INSIDE EUROPE

342

famously with Whistler. His family connections are typical of the
gentry. His wife is the daughter of Sir Gervase Beckett; once he
fought an election against Frances Countess of Warwick, who (only a
genealogist could get the details clear) was both his sister’s mother-
in-law and his wife’s stepmother’s sister. Eden went to war at seven-
teen and was gassed at Ypres; at twenty-one he was a captain. Then
he went to Christ Church, Oxford. He was not faintly interested in
politics; he did not even join the Union. He studied (and got first-
class honors in) Oriental languages; his only conspicuous undergraduate
activity seems to have been an essay he wrote on — Cezanne.

But presently he found himself in politics, and his rise was extraordi-
narily rapid. It seemed at first that he was a typical specimen of the young
man-about-politics : good family; Eton and Oxford; War service; hand-
some wife; two sturdy boys; comfortable private means; impeccable
clothes; conventional good looks. But by 1926 he had become parlia-
mentary private secretary to Sir Austen Chamberlain, then the foreign
secretary. This was partly because the shrewd Baldwin had an eye
on him, partly because the conservative backbenchers were demanding
jobs for the young men. By 1931 he was parliamentary under-secretary
to the foreign office, and as Sir John Simon’s popularity at Geneva and
Whitehall waned, Eden’s rose. He did most of the hard work at Geneva.
In 1934, as Lord Privy Seal, he was practically the sub-foreign
minister; in 1935 he entered the cabinet as minister without portfolio
for League of Nations affairs.

It was not merely his sincerity for peace and his extreme charm and
likeableness that brought him this post. What counted were, first, the
picturesque unorthodoxies in his character, which were especially notable
because his outward stamp appeared to conform so closely to the com-
mon mold. He had studied Persian; this was odd. Once in Sweden,
guest of honor at a hunt, he refused to shoot a stag, because it was ‘‘too
beautiful.” Second, he was Baldwin’s “man” in the Foreign Office, and
thus a check on Simon, who was detested by the Tories. Third, the
permanent staff of the Foreign Office swore by him.

Eden is a skillful and patient negotiator; he made the Jugoslavs
and Hungarians agree after the murder of King Alexander, which
is as if he had made Goering and Dimitrov kiss. He was the first
British cabinet minister to enter Russia since the revolution in 1917;
the job called for the maximum of tact, resilience, candor and common
sense. The Soviets had been deeply suspicious of British policy, and

MEN OF WHITEHALL 343

the British Tories thought that Stalin and his men were poison Then
came Abyssinia, and Eden’s importance in British politics steeply
rose; he was the darling of the peace-balloters and the pacifists, so
much so that his departure from the government might have wrecked
it. To millions in the country, Eden personified peace.

Why didn’t Eden resign after the Hoare-Laval fiasco? Probably
because the '"old-school-tie” tradition demanded that he stay loyal to
his chief. Three years later, in 1938, he did resign, as I have noted in
Chapter VIII above. He stood by his principles, against Chamberlain’s
policy of ‘‘appeasing” the dictators. When the War Cabinet was formed
in 1939^ Eden became Dominions Secretary with access to it.

Pious Halifax

We have several times mentioned Lord Cecil, England’s foremost
apostle of disarmament. There should also be a word about Lord
Halifax, called the “saintliest” character in British public life, the
present foreign minister. Like many Englishmen of the upper classes,
his name has changed with bewildering frequency; as minister of agri-
culture he was known as Edward Wood; as the most notable Viceroy
of India of modern times he was Lord Irwin. He was born in 1881,
and went to Eton and Christ’s Church. Now called Lord Halifax since
his father’s death, he is a member of the War Cabinet and one of the
three or four most important men in England. Halifax, like Simon
and several other British intellectuals who are also politicians, was a
Fellow of All Souls at Oxford, a great distinction; since 1933 he has
been Chancellor of Oxford University. He is a devout churchman.
A “liberal” among the conservatives, the modesty, detachment, un-
worldliness, and extreme moral dignity of his character have brought
him fame.

The War Cabinet and Military Leaders

Chamberlain, Churchill, Halifax, Hoare, and Simon are perhaps the
most conspicuous members of the British War Cabinet of nine. But
there should be mention at least of the others, especially Leslie Hore-
Belisha, the war minister, and Sir Kingsley Wood, the minister for air.

Mr. Hore-Belisha is one of the fabulous creatures who intrudes on
the dull uniformity of British official life like an orchid among prim-
roses, For a considerable time, despite his intelligence and likeableness,
his career was frustrated; first he was a liberal during a period of

INSIDE EUROPE

344

predominant conservative drift in public affairs, second he was con-
sidered just a shade too clever, too flamboyant, to be ‘‘safe.’" The Colonel
Blimps and dilapidated lordships were afraid of him, as they were
afraid of Churchill.

Hore-Belisha was born near London of an old and distinguished
Jewish family that came originally from Portugal, The year was 1893.
He went to Oxford, became president of the celebrated debating society
known as the Oxford Union — ^as have so many British politicians be-
fore him — ^and during the war rose to the rank of major. He entered
politics, becoming an M.P. in 1923, and since the formation of the
National government, has been, like Simon, a “Liberal National.” He
got his first big post as minister of transport in 1934. Promptly, with
great vigor and capacity to attract attention, he became a national
institution through his “Belisha beacons,” the orange bulbs telling
pedestrians where to cross streets in presumptive safety. In 1937 he be-
came Secretary of State for War. He has been the most enterprising
British war minister in a generation.

Bustling, industrious, unconventional, Hore-Belisha did his best to
revivify the army. He cut out dead wood at the top ; he tried to make
openings at the bottom. He advocated mechanization ; he listened — ^atten-
tively — ^to Captain Liddell Hart, the foremost British authority on
military affairs. Blasts of ventilation swept through the war office.
He organized a new retirement scheme, so that good young men could
rise quickly. Hereafter a British major retires at 47 — ^if he isn’t any
good. Seniority is abolished above the rank of major, with promotion
on the basis of ability. One recalls the old sarcastic maxim : “No damned
nonsense about merit.” Hore-Belisha tried to make merit — youthful
merit — count.

Hore-Belisha’s job is probably the most difficult in England. In
March, 1939, he announced that in the event of war the British in-
tended to send roughly 300,000 men to France. In April — to meet the
exigencies of a fast-changing and dangerous world — Britain adopted
conscription. Hore-Belisha had to put conscription into active operation,
no mean feat. Meantime he reorganized the Territorials.

Sir Kingsley Wood, the minister for air and as such automatically
a member of the War Cabinet, is a cherubic-looking small man, bom
in 1881, a lawyer by profession. His chief interest has always been
in the realm of public health, social insurance, and the like, and he was
minister of health from 1935 to 1938. Before that he was a highly

MEN OF WHITEHALL 345

successful Postmaster General; he believed in such “innovations'" as
bright and effective publicity, and he used unique promotion methods
to “sell" the British postal and telegraph services to the people. When
the air ministry, under Lord Swinton, had reached a shocking stage
of muddle, stalemate, and ineptitude, Kingsley Wood was called in to
take charge and renovate it; he became air minister in 1938. Britain
needed a tremendous air fleet; Britain wasn't getting a tremendous air
fleet; Wood had the task of making one. When war came in 1939, he
hadn't quite caught up to General Goering, but he was moving fast.

The minister for coordination of defense, also a member of the
War Cabinet, is Admiral Lord Chatfield. He is 66; he retired from
active service last year, when he was Admiral of the Fleet, on reaching
the age limit. Immediately he was put to work in administrative fields.
Chatfield was Beatty's flag captain on the Lion in the 1914 war, and he
fought at Jutland. For five years, from 1933 to 1938, he was First Sea
Lord, that is, the professional director of British naval forces. Chat-
field is quiet, shrewd, unassuming, and of vast experience. His job is
to correlate activity of the three defense ministries, and link them to the
prime minister.

Not in the War Cabinet, but hovering just outside, is Sir John Ander-
son, the Home Secretary and minister of home security. Anderson,
a lean, flint-like, tight-lipped Scotsman, has had an astonishing career.
He was a civil servant — one of the men, like Vansittart and Hankey,
who form the concrete matrix of the British governmental structure.
He worked in the colonial office, in the field of social insurance, in the
ministry of shipping, in Ireland, and in the ministry of health; for ten
years, 1922-32, he was Permanent Under-secretary of the Home Office,
the same job that Vansittart had in foreign affairs. Then Anderson was
pushed upward into the limelight. He became Governor of Bengal,
though it was most unusual for a civil servant to get such a post, during
the most active period of Bengal terrorism ; his regime was hard-handed
in the extreme. His term concluded, Anderson returned to England,
ran for parliament, and almost at once was given cabinet rank. He is
one of the few civil servants ever to become a minister. When war
broke out he was in charge of Air Raid Precautions.

Also outside the War Cabinet — ^but of great consequence in prose-
cution of the war — are W. S. Morrison, the food minister, Leslie Burgirx,

INSIDE EUROPE

346

the minister of supply, and especially Ronald H. Cross, the youthful head
of the newly created ministry of economic warfare, i.e., minister of
blockade.

General Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff,
and as such the first soldier in Great Britain, is 59. Two distinctions
may be mentioned at once : he is six feet four, a tremendous blunt pillar
of a man (and thus, of course, he is nicknamed ''Tiny'") ; and, an ex-
traordinary linguist, he knows not less than ten languages. Ironside at
various times has been an artillery subaltern, a military historian, the
commander of British forces at Archangel and in Persia (where he “dis-
covered" the present Shah, Reza Pahlevi), commander of the staff
college, and governor-general of Gibraltar. It was he, in the summer
of 1939, who led a mission to Poland, seeking to find out how — ^if at all —
Britain could defend the Poles, and the Poles defend themselves. Iron-
side is a sturdy campaigner — ^and one as much at home with maps
as guns.

General John Standish Surtees Prendergast Vereker, Viscount Gort,
V.C., is commander of the British field forces in France. He is only 54;
the ebullient Hore-Belisha chose him three years ago as an officer
destined for supreme command, and picked him as Chief of the Im-
perial General Staff — ^which job Ironside has now assumed — over the
heads of ninety officers. Lord Gort is a gallant and picturesque figure.
He won his Victoria Cross in 1918 when, a battalion commander, he
continued to lead his men to their objective on the Canal du Nord al-
though he was twice severely wounded. He has also won the D.S.O.
(with three citations) and the Military Cross. In the Great War he
never commanded a larger unit than a battalion. He became a colonel
in 1926, and a general in 1935. He was commandant of the staff college
for a time, and then became Hore-Belisha's military secretary.

Tories

Alfred Duff Cooper, husband of Lady Diana, is a cut above the other
Tories: intelligent-plus, combative, thoroughly sound in foreign policy,
liberal, tenacious. He and Eden were the “young Turks'" in the Baldwin
cabinet, opposed to the ossified conservatism of the older statesmen.
When he became minister of war late in 1935, after years of impatient
second-stringing. Duff Cooper made things hum. He doesn't mind being

MEN OF WHITEHALL 347

indiscreet when necessary. Early in his tenure of office he tilted a
lance at the pacifist bishops, and in Paris he raised a minor storm by
a sensible speech (in French) which was interpreted as a bid for an
Anglo-French alliance. In September, 1938, after Munich, he was
the only cabinet minister— he was First Lord of the Admiralty at the
time — to resign. This showed sharp foresight, and took great courage.
Chamberlain was bitterly hurt, and has never given him office since.
Duff Cooper is only forty-eight. The social grace and beauty of his wife
have been of considerable importance to his career. Their young son, like
his father, will go to Eton. Duff Cooper is the author of an admirable
book on Talleyrand, and a long biography of Field-Marshal Lord Haig.

Major (now Mr.) Walter Elliot, formerly the food dictator, now
minister for health and the man responsible for the highly successful
evacuation of children from the great cities in 1939, began political life
as a Fabian socialist; he is a Tory to-day, but the Tory who is most
susceptible to the contemporary shibboleth of ‘‘planning.’’ His abstruse
experiments in reorganizing British agriculture, his complex net of
subsidies and quotas and marketing acts are necessary because a com-
plete policy of agrarian protection would starve England. He was edu-
cated to be a doctor; he wants to be a scientist in politics. Even Mr.
Wells is not enough a planner for his taste. Commenting on a speech
by Wells, “Whither Britain?” Elliot said, “He consigned himself to the
nineteenth century with his opening remarks.”

Like many Britons, Elliot has a rhyming sense of the ridiculous.
The philosophy of determinism, he remarked in his presidential ad-
dress to Aberdeen University, might be expressed by the following
ditty :

“Oh, damn ! At last I perceive what I am.

Just a creature that moves in predestinate grooves,

I’m not even a bus, but a tram !”

Then, describing the astronomer Sir James Jeans, Elliot said:

“Oh, cus ! Though his picture grows steadily wus,

I shall go on my way whatever they say.

For I won’t be a tram, I’m a bus !”

And when he was a student at Glasgow University he wrote an
Ode to the Pig, two lines of which were :

“Alive it is a loathsome beast.

But dead provides a toothsome feast.”

INSIDE EUROPE

348

His visions of economic reconstruction follow quite orthodox lines;
the ‘‘leisure state/’ he thinks, can be produced by laisses-faire capi-
talism. He is a relentless empiricist; the saying was that he remained
minister of agriculture because no one else could possibly understand
the complicated structure of his regulations. Their result has been, of
course, to make much friction with the Dominions, who quarreled about
how much meat they might export to Britain, and to raise the prices
of foodstuffs for the British consumer, in order that the producers
might survive.

Oliver Stanley, formerly minister of labor, now President of The
Board of Trade, is the son of the Earl of Derby, and he married Lady
Maureen Stewart, daughter of Lord Londonderry. He has, like most
Tory politicians, a good war record; unlike most of them, he is a wit:
once he said that Sidney Webb had “blue books in his veins.” During
the General Strike he served as a clerk in the Westminster tube station.
With the willingness to admit mistakes that is an excellent tradition
in British politics, he offered to resign as minister of labor when the
Means Test regulations broke down. “That the responsibility for the
error was mine is a thing,” he said, “that I have never attempted to
evade.” He didn’t explain why he had made the error in the first
place, Ramsay MacDonald, the “socialist,” refused to accept his resig-
nation.

Sir Thomas Inskip is the sixty-three-year-old man of mystery, who,
to general astonishment, was promoted early in 1936 to be minister for
the coordination of defense. Inskip, a devout churchman, is, above all,
“safe” ; therefore he was sometimes spoken of as a future prime minister.
One cruel story accounts for his defense appointment on the ground
that Baldwin, with great difficulty, had to find someone for the job “even
less brilliant than himself.” In 1939 he became Lord Chancellor.

Not So Simple Simon

Sir John Simon, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1939 War
Cabinet, just squeezed home in the 1935 general election, with his group
of “Liberal National” supporters of the coalition government reduced
in number. No matter how unpopular Simon may be his position in
the cabinet is secure, because inclusion of his liberal supporters is neces-
sary to retain the pretense of “National” government. This, of course,
causes dissatisfaction in Tory ranks; the MacDonald “National La-
borites” who possess exactly seven seats in the House of Commons, have

MEN OF WHITEHALL 349

three cabinet posts^ ; the Simonites have no fewer than four jobs in
the cabinet for their meager thirty-three seats in the House ; the Tories,
with a colossal block of three hundred and eighty-four seats, have to be
satisfied with the rest of the cabinet posts, twenty-two in all

Simon, the greatest lawyer in modern England and the worst for-
eign minister, has always wanted to be liked more than people liked
him. This is the tragedy of his life. About no other man in English
public life, except MacDonald, is there such a miscellany of cruel
legends.

One story has it that he secured so many convictions against others
that he lost his own.

Mr. Lloyd George is reported to have said of him that “John Simon
had sat on the fence so long that the iron entered his soul

One apocryphal story is that Simon, finding an acquaintance of
long standing to be at last useful, came up to him, put his arm around
his shoulders — ^and called him by the wrong Christian name.

Mr. Garvin, referring to the “half-headedness and half-heartedness”
of the foreign policy of the first National government, said that Simon
created the impression of a man marking time with an agility intended
to resemble walking.

The story is told that when Sir John Simon plays golf, he putts
around bunkers.

He understands things, it was said, “only through his mind.”

In one of his really bad-tempered moments, Mr. Lloyd George said,
“Many a better man than he has crossed the floor of this House before
him, but none has left such a slimy trail of hypocrisy behind him.”
{Inquest on Peace, p. 356.)

Philip Snowden said, “Sir John Simon is the chief advertising agent
of the government and of himself ; but if he had any sense of the pitiable
failure he made of the high and responsible office he held, but of which
he was happily deprived for his country’s good, instead of appearing
so much on the public platforms he would hide his head in some place
of suitable obscurity in the hope that his miserable record would be
forgotten.”

Simon is, of course, not nearly so forbidding a creature as these stories
make out An exceptionally shy man, lonely and anxious to be popular,

^Reduced to two when J. H. (‘Jimmy”) Thomas resigned in June, 1936, after
the budget leakage scandal.

3S0

INSIDE EUROPE

he was afraid to offend people That he was an able and devoted public
servant for almost a generation was never doubted.

His unpopularity as foreign minister was largely the result of his
virtual advocacy of the Japanese case in the Manchurian crisis at
Geneva. Matsoaka, the Japanese delegate, told friends that Simon had
said in fifteen minues what he had been trying to express for weeks.
Simon offended the United States during the Manchurian crisis; he
disastrously weakened the League ; he was accused of responsibility for
the failure of the disarmament conference.

It was Simon who, in a historic speech during the General Strike,
declared the strike illegal, which more than any other thing broke
the spirit of the workers. This has not endeared him to labor.

It was Simon who, as chairman of the Indian Statutory Commission,
produced a report hundreds of pages long (which was a dead letter
before it was published) ; he gave Mr. Gandhi only a few paragraphs.

Liberals

The opposition Liberals were practically wiped out in the 1935 elec-
tions, Sir Herbert Samuel, the brilliantly cultivated Jewish philosopher
who had been leader of the party, lost his seat; his successor was Sir
Archibald Sinclair, a young Scot who is half American and who began
politics as Winston ChurchilFs secretary. Sinclair was honest and bold
enough to sacrifice his career — ^temporarily — ^by sticking to free-trade and
the remnants of the historic Liberal party, when after the Ottawa agree-
ments he crossed the floor of the House and resigned his membership
in the first National government.

David Lloyd George and his family group survived in the 1935 elec-
tions. They are “independent” liberals. Lloyd George himself has sat
in the Commons uninterruptedly for forty-seven years, a dazzling record.
But at the end of his career the great Welshman was fighting a more
serious enemy than any political adversary : he was fighting — ^time. His
last speeches, however illuminating they may have been on domestic af-
fairs, have acutely disappointed his friends when they touched on the
situation abroad. Lloyd George has turned into a defeatist and some-
thing of a pro-German; doubtless this is conscience money for the
Treaty of Versailles.

Sir John Reith

Sir John Reith, for years the director-general of the British Broad-
casting Corporation, is not a resident of Whitehall, but his modernist cit-

MEN OF WHITEHALL

351

adel on Portland Place was more important in the life of Britain than
most government offices. Reith, “a fanatical Puritan, m awe of hell, yet
suspecting Heaven,^’ is a complex character; he rules the B.B.C. with a
hand of granite. ‘‘A great black tower of a man, one eye burning fiercely,
one a little scared, mouth molded in a cynical No,’’ ( I am quoting an
anonymous commentator in the New Statesman,) ‘‘His smile is so rare
and so lovely that the humanity it discovers seems a mirage.”

Reith is a Scotsman, the son of a Glasgow clergyman. He had long
experience as an engineer, first in the civil engineering department of
the Admiralty, then as general manager of Wm. Beardmore and Sons,
the steel firm. He made the B.B.C. an expression of his nonconformist
conscience, and also what is probably the finest broadcasting organization
in the world. Even the socialists like it, because it is a public body
ruled by charter, and its relation to the state is semi-socialistic. Reith
left the B.B.C. just before the war to reorganize British civil aviation.
He is almost certain to have a big political job some day.

Norman and the Bank of England

“Unless drastic measures are taken to save it, the capitalist system throughout
the world will be wrecked within a year,”

— Montague Norman in 1931.

Montague Collet Norman, since 1920 governor of the Bank of Eng-
land, is to banking born. Both his grandfathers were directors of the
Bank of England, one of them for more than fifty years. He went to
Eton, King’s College, Cambridge, and served in the South African
war. For some years he worked in commercial banking (he was con-
nected with the house of Brown-Shipley) ; like many important bankers,
he is not much interested in money personally, and he is by no means a
very rich man ; money and its mechanism are rather a fascinating prob-
lem to him as a diplomat, a mathematician, almost a creative artist.

His farouche air of international intrigue-cum-artistic worldliness is
famous. Everything is permitted him, because he has been governor of
the Bank of England longer than any man in history. He married a
divorcee ; yet is presumably not excluded from invitations to the Palace.
He wears flowing capes, black slouch hats, and a waggish beard; his
house on Campden Hill is decorated with extraordinary silken elegance.
Yet he takes the Tube to work every morning, and likes to be the last
man on the escalator. He enjoys appearing to be mysterious, and he has
made only three public speeches in his life.

There is a certain waggishness to Norman. When he returned to

INSIDE EUROPE

352

his Bedfordshire birthplace after the Boer war the townsmen gave him
a rousing welcome, since he had been their most conspicuous warrior.
They put him in a carriage and drew it up a steep hill toward his home.
Halfway up the villagers hauling at the shafts looked around and saw
that the carriage was empty. Where was Lieutenant Norman? Pushing
the vehicle from behind !

His Campden Hill house is as much a country lodge as one can
imagine in the heart of London. Its grounds contain an apple orchard,
a rose garden, and goldfish pools, but, like almost all Londoners, Nor-
man prefers the real country. He spends most of his week ends in
a farmyard cottage on his brother’s estate in Much Hadham, Hert-
fordshire village; strictly incognito, he wears flannel bags, fastened
at the ankles with cycle clips, and a bright red beret. He has a passion
for interior decoration — ^and for the poems of Kipling.

One of his greatest friends is an eighty-year-old American million-
airess, whom he visits (with much air of mystery) almost every year.
Reason : he was at school with her son in England, and while they were
taking a tramp together during an American vacation, the young man
was killed in an automobile accident, Norman stayed to comfort the
mother, and has been something of a son to her ever since.

Norman’s experience alone would make him indispensable. But he
has more than mere experience. His technical capacity to handle bank-
ing problems and his skill and boldness in negotiation are considerable.
Like many Englishmen, he knows how to make a virtue of humility;
in October, 1932, he said: ‘‘The difficulties are so great, the forces are
so unlimited, precedents are so lacking, that I approach the whole sub-
ject in ignorance. ... It is too great for me — I will admit that for
the moment the way, to me, is not clear.”

Once, amiably chatting with a banker friend, he listened imperviously
to the argument that the gold standard would impoverish Britain in the
long run. “Tell me,” Norman asked, “do you think it better to be rich
than to be poor?” His friend replied, “Well, I have been poor, and now
I am fairly rich, and I hope to be richer.” Norman replied that he was
not sure but that countries which were too rich went to pieces; he
pointed to the example of Periclean Athens and Imperial Rome. His
friend did not reveal the substance of the conversation ; the intimation
that the governor of the Bank of England might consider it his duty
to impoverish his country for its eventual benefit would not have been
too popular.

MEN OF WHITEHALL

353

He was, of course, the main spirit forcing England back to the gold
standard in 1925. This severely punished British industry, but, like
most central bankers, Norman worshiped gold. By insisting that Snow-
den (who didn’t need much persuasion) should stick to gold, he was
the spiritual author of the 1931 financial crisis. He has admitted, too.
that various foreign (mostly German) concerns had been able '‘to bor-
row on short credit sums which, had the various lenders all been aware
of it, would have been quite out of the question.” Apparently there was
little cooperation between the leading agencies in London; competi-
tively they threw their money away. When Britain was finally forced
off gold, Norman, according to one story, was so shocked that he
fainted.

Norman has, as is well known, great regard for Dr. Schacht; the
governors of all the central banks play together closely. His high opinion
of Schacht’s shrewdness dates, it is believed, from 1927, when both
attended a conference in New York. Schacht opposed, speaking broadly,
a world easy money policy ; Norman favored it. Events ultimately proved
Schacht to be right, because the unstable Wall Street boom, when it
collapsed, provoked the world crisis; and Norman ever after has re-
spected Schacht for his prescience, and for having proved that he, Nor-
man, was wrong.

Hugh Dalton, who was under-secretary for foreign affairs in the sec-
ond Labour government, records how he became aware that Norman
pursued a foreign policy quite his own There was a “dyarchy.” No mat-
ter what the real foreign office might be doing, Norman’s policy pro-
ceeded on the basis that “unless Germany is economically strong and
prosperous, it is impossible to balance the one-sided political strength
of France on the Continent.” When the Credit Anstalt, the great Roths-
child bank, crashed in Vienna in 1931, Norman on his own responsibil-
ity advanced to Austria enough credit, it was hoped, to tide the crisis
over. Two years later the loan was transferred from the books of
the bank to the treasury, i.e., the British taxpayer.

But it should not be assumed too glibly that Norman always rules
the treasury. Snowden fed out of his hand; but not Neville Chamberlain,
Indeed the treasury, ever since the devaluation of sterling, has been
more important than the Bank, because the treasury, by controlling
the exchanges through the $1,500,000,000 Equalization Fund, has
usurped one of the Bank’s primary functions. Norman would like to see
the pound high and stable, and perhaps even a return to gold. The

354

INSIDE EUROPE

treasury wants to keep the pound fairly low and, within limits, variable,
in order to reduce the debt charge on the budget and to encourage in-
dustry. So far the treasury has been the winner.

Lord Becmerhrook

The circulation of his chief newspaper, the Daily Express, is the
largest in the world, some two and a half million daily, and soon it may
be three million. The quality of his ambition is inconstant: business,
politics, journalism, have taken him by turn. The bitterness of his feud
with Baldwin is partially forgotten; his influence in crusading for em-
pire free trade, friendship with the United States, and isolation from
the continent, is still considerable. His reputation as a host is fabulous ;
all over the world friends testify to the magnitude of his charm. Wil-
liam Maxwell Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, the chief of the 'Tress Lords,’"
is one of the most provocative and original public men in England.

Beaverbrook, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in On-
tario, Canada, in 1879. A poor boy, he amassed an astounding fortune,
at least a million pounds, by the time he was 30 Electric power and
cement were his magic lamps. He dropped business, went to England,
ran for parliament, and became the close friend, the eminence grise
of Bonar Law. For ten years, mostly behind the scenes (though he was
a cabinet minister once) Beaverbrook — 3. new "incomparable Max” —
shifted other cabinet ministers like puppets. He made the alliance be-
tween Bonar Law and Lloyd George; he played a prominent part in
overthrowing Asquith. Then apparently politics began to bore him.
His health, too, was uneven. He took over the Daily Express, founded
the Sunday Express, obtained control of the Evening Standard, and
ever since has been the restless Puck of British journalism.

Chdpter XXII

Left and Right in England

When a Tevolutionaty party has not the support of a ntch
jority either among the vanguard of the revolutionary class or
among the rural population, there can he no question of a rising.
A rising must have not only the majority, but must have the
incoming revolutionary tide over the whole country, the com^
plete moral and political bankruptcy of the old regime — and a
deep-seated sense of insecurity among all these irresolute ele-
ments.

— Lenin

SOCIALISM in England, as is notorious, is not revolutionary, and
^ not even the grisly condition of the depressed areas, the suffering
of two million unemployed, and the eloquence of Sir Stafford Cripps
can make it so. It is difficult to organize effective solidarity among
the poor in a country where, as Mirsky puts it, ‘‘the smallest white
collar clerk thinks of himself as the opposite of a workman.” The
measure of British recovery that has occurred has occurred partly at
the expense of the working class ; but this does not much increase the
Labour party, the I.L.P., or the exiguous communist vote.

The Labour party itself, a product of the Fabian doctrine of the “in-
evitability of gradualness,” made no official declaration of socialist
principles until 1918. The influence of Marx among British socialists
was always comparatively small ; and when the first Labour government
was formed, it took office not only on sufferance but on the understand-
ing that, even if it could, it would introduce no socialist measures. The
trade unions (who represent eight million British workmen) only be-
came formally committed to socialism in 1924. Trotsky quotes Mac-
Donald to the effect that revolution is “a ruin and a calamity, and noth-
ing more.”

When labor was called upon to form a government, Hugh Dalton
says, it had the choice of three alternatives. It could have refused office,
since there was no clear labor majority in parliament. It could have ac-

355

INSIDE EUROPE

356

cepted office, introduced "some bold socialist measures,^’ and gone down
to defeat, then appealing to the country in a new election. Or it could
have cooperated freely and frankly with the liberals who held the
balance of power. Instead, the MacDonald cabinet did none of the three ;
it only muddled.

Labor had won 261 seats in 1929, a very respectable total (caused
partly because so many fights at that time were three-cornered). It
sank to 57 after the financial crisis of 1931 and the formation of the
National government. In 1935 it rose only to 154, though the total op-
position vote was forty-six per cent of the electorate. There were sev-
eral reasons why the showing was not better. First, the National gov-
ernment boasted of the prosperity it had produced. Second, labor was
in an impossible position as regards foreign policy, since on the one
hand it supported the government in sanctions, while on the other,
illogically, it opposed rearmament.

Armament had been a disastrous issue for Leftists everywhere for
several years. If they took a genuinely long view, they had to concede
the necessity of eventual defense against Germany. Yet if they sup-
ported armament and a strong government they would assist to make
capitalism stronger and thus write the doom of socialist reform in their
own countries. The first duty of genuine Leftists was to support the
U.S.S.R. But since Germany was the chief potential enemy of the
U.S.S.R., they could do this only by strengthening the capitalist states
which were anti-German, and which would then be in a stronger posi-
tion to destroy revolution at home.

Besides labor in England suffered from divided leadership. The death
of Arthur Henderson removed the one personage in the party both vital
and venerable. Henderson, a doughty figure, whose heart and health
were broken by the sabotage of the disarmament conference, spoke in
a language few of his subordinates had the courage or capacity to copy.
When he was foreign minister in the second Labour government, the
New Statesman relates, one of his officials suggested that he send tele-
grams to Mussolini and the Pope congratulating them on the Lateran
Treaty. "No,” replied Uncle Arthur. "I shall send no telegram to the
Pope ; I am a Wesleyan. I shall send no telegram to Mussolini ; I have
denounced him in a public speech as the murderer of Matteotti.”

Of the contemporary labor chieftains, the most interesting are prob-
ably Morrison and Cripps.

LEFT AND RIGHT IN ENGLAND

357

The Boss of London

“The socialist minister of the future must try to be as good a man at business
for public ends as the ablest of the capitalists or managing directors are for private
ends. ... It is essential that socialism should be sound public business as well as
being healthy in its social morality ”

— Herbert Morrison.

Morrison is a born Cockney. He is the son of a policeman. He has
lost one eye. He had only grade-school education. He has been an er-
rand boy, a shop assistant, and a telephone operator. The curl in his
hair, his unquenchable good humor, his gift for pungent repartee, his
realistic optimism, make him resemble early characters by H. G. Wells,
for instance Kipps. He has been secretary of the London Labour party
since 1914, and he is an efficient and indeed almost a ruthlessly good
organizer. Since 1932 he has been not only party boss in London but
majority leader of the London County Council, a position equivalent
to that of mayor in an American city. As minister of transport in
the second Labour government, he put through its most praiseworthy
legislation, the bill reorganizing London transport. He is plausible, lively,
and inquisitive.

""Mr. Morrison, '' wrote A. J. Cummings in the News Chronicle^ ""is
the rising hope of the labor party — one might say its only hope. He
is a comparatively young man with a political future that holds out
the dazzling promise of the premiership as its crown and climax. He is
an astute politician with sincere convictions whose party loyalty has
never been questioned.''

But in 1935 Morrison was not chosen as the leader of the parlia-
mentary labor party, but instead a man somewhat his inferior in
personality and push, Major Clement Attlee; which was a bitter disap-
pointment to those who had thought of Morrison as the inevitable leader.
Reasons ; Morrison was too much on the Right for the Leftists in the
party. Moreover, the trade unionists suspected he was too strong a
character to be easily manageable. He was a London product, and
the trade unions dislike the London Labour party, in which their in-
fluence is comparatively small. Finally, Llorrison was the victim of
inertia. Attlee had succeeded to the temporary leadership of the party
when old George Lansbury resigned, and he led the party in the election
fight; it seemed discourteous to remove him

Morrison is not an expert on foreign affairs, but his intuition is quick
and his instincts good. At the 1935 party congress, for instance, he

INSIDE EUROPE

358

''urged that the labor movement (which had just adopted sanctions by
a twenty to one vote) should not make the mistake of assuming that it
could destroy Fascism by upsetting Mussolini as it once hoped to destroy
militarism by getting rid of the Kaiser.”

He is distinctly on the Right wing of the labor movement ; but even
so the Leftists thoroughly respect him.

Cripps

“You have only got to look at the pages of British imperial history to hide your
head in shame that you are British.”

— Sir Stafford Cripps.

The best intellect among labor M.P.’s is probably that of Sir Stafford
Cripps, son of Lord Parmoor and nephew of the Sidney Webbs, socialist
by conviction, one of the best parliamentarians in England, and, like
Simon, a great lawyer and advocate. He founded the socialist league
(within the parliamentary labor party) ; he is very far to the Left. He
shocked a good many people by saying once that eventually "we shall
have to overcome opposition from Buckingham Palace.” Tories — a. sig-
nificant point — ^are afraid of Cripps, whereas few of them fear Morrison.
They think that Cripps might, if he got the chance, inaugurate a real so-
cial! sm-in-our-time policy, and even try to abolish the House of Lords,
and rule by an Enabling Act. This has frightened conservative laborites
too; and after a good start toward the party leadership, he underwent
comparative eclipse.

England is a country of superb surprises ; for which reason one should
not be surprised to learn that Cripps, the last possible remove from
the workman-agitator, is a man of considerable wealth; he fights in-
trenched privilege from the inside. His fees as a K.C. are estimated
at $150,000 per year. Once he told a political audience that as a lawyer
he met the people of the ruling classes: “They pay me fabulous and
fantastic sums to get them out of their difficulties. I have no hesitation
in saying that the working class of this country are more capable of
ruling than they are.” And the passionate radical sincerity of his con-
victions is beyond doubt. He was expelled from the party in 1939
largely because he wanted a United Front with the communists.

Cripps has pointed out that during the first term of the National
government the number of people on Poor Law Relief increased by
four hundred thousand and he is convinced that Fascism has already pro-
truded ugly fingers in the life of Britain. The Manchester Guardian

LEFT AND RIGHT IN ENGLAND 359

quoted him recently saying that the first definite and conscious step
toward Fascism was the Trades Dispute Act of 1927. The 1931 elec-
tions were "^essentially Fascist in nature” ; the forces of capitalism had
such a triumph at the polls that “there was no need for any formal
personal dictatorship,” He notes the contrast of subsidies to capitalists —
for instance those of Elliot’s agricultural schemes — with ""the discipline
imposed on the workers through the Means Test.”

His definition of the corporate state is interesting: ""A method by
which complete power is given to the capitalist to produce that scarcity
which will insure him a share of the national wealth, out of all propor-
tion to his efforts, and which will enable him to enslave the workers by
substituting for their freedom and right to combine a nominal and in-
effective minority voice in the government of industry.”

Cripps and Morrison might be quite capable of working well to-
gether, despite their ideological differences. The former could supply
theory and strategy; the latter organizing power and sense of political
tactics. But against them both is the great conservative force of the
trade unions.

The T.U.C.

'Tor my part I would rather rely on Sir Walter Citrine, archpriest of British
trade unionism, than on Mr. Baldwin, the conservative prime minister, to keep the
present system intact. There is to-day no Toryism more fearful and immovable
than that which is enshrined in the ideals and practice of trade union leadership.”

— ^A. J. Cummings.

Among labor M.P.’s in 1939 there were seventy-two nominees of
the Labour party itself, and seventy-four representatives of the trade
unions. These were subdivided as follows: thirty-seven men of the
miners’ federation, seven municipal workers, six railway clerks, six
transport workers, five distributive workers, three from the national
union of railway men, two compositors, and one each from eight other
tmions. The last thing that most of them want would be socialism in
our time.

The most prominent trade unionists, like the general secretary Sir
Walter Citrine, whom the National government shrewdly knighted, and
Ernest Bevan, the boss of the comparatively new and powerful Transport
and General Workers’ Union are not M.P.’s. The general rule is that
the T.U.C. (Trade Union Congress) chieftains stay outside active
politics. But they control the Labour party, because they control the
funds.

INSIDE EUROPE

360

The triumph of Sir Walter Citrine is that of method. He was a
member of an electrical union and then became assistant-secretary of
the Trades Union Congress ; his extreme organizational skill made him
indispensable ; and he succeeded to the leadership. He lives, it has been
said, on his files; he is a filing Robot. When, once, he was invited to
an informal discussion among labor intellectuals, to thrash out some
party business, he brought the files — Bnd a secretary — ^along ; the secre-
tary took down everything that he said, presumably so that later he
could not be incorrectly quoted. He is cold, precise, and incredibly effi-
cient; he never had a live idea in his life; and his speeches are ‘like a
drizzle of incessant rain."

Citrine visited Moscow in the autumn of 1935, and wrote a book
which sought to be impartial. He has opposed all efforts for a com-
munist-socialist united front, and since 1928 has been president of the
International Federation of Trade Unions.

Attlee and Others

The leader of the Labour party and head of His Majesty’s most loyal
Opposition, Major Clement Attlee, would not have been leader had not
the whole Labour front bench been wiped out in the 1931 elections. But
since 193$, when he has had a chance to show himself, his capabilities
have vastly improved. Attlee was of middle-class parentage and back-
ground, and became a socialist through intellectual conviction rather
than through the hard school of poverty and direct awareness of social
injustice. He has considerable grace and pertinacity and a very fair
wit. In two years he labored with Sir John Simon as labor represent-
ative in the Indian Statutory Commission. He is only fifty-six, but re-
cently he has been severely ill. Unlike most labor leaders, he is a
public school and Oxford man. What he lacks most is color and per-
sonality.

Among the younger socialists the most interesting is perhaps Aneurin
Bevan, the member for Ebbw Vale. His wife is Jennie Lee, youthful
member of the Scottish I.L.P, Bevan is a Welshman, a miner’s son, who
worked underground as a child and then educated himself despite for-
midable obstacles of poverty. Vital, ambitious, magnetic, with an im*
petuous Welsh laugh, he is one of the most attractive characters in the
Commons. His comment on sanctions gives a clue to his pungent qual-
ity: “Britain’s policy is that of the successful burglar turned house-
holder who wants a strong police force. If I am going to ask any worker

LEFT AND RIGHT IN ENGLAND 361

to shed his blood, it will not be for medieval Abyssinia or for Fascist
Italy, but for the making of a better social system in this country.”

Arthur Greenwood, a veteran laborite, born in 1880, became acting
leader of the party during Attlee’s illness in 1939. He rose to the
occasion. His speeches during the war crisis were the best of his
career, and among the best the House heard from anybody. Greenwood
was Minister of Health m the second Labour government. His great in-
terest is workers’ education.

The Red Fringe

One communist M.P. was elected to the House of Commons in No-
vember, 1935, Willie Gallagher, a veteran Scottish revolutionary. A
typical enough Clydeside crusader, he began as a liberal, turned socialist,
finally became a communist; he led the first strike against the war
— in 1915 — ^that took place in England; Lenin admired him greatly. But
Gallagher is not as imponant to the communist movement as Harry
Pollitt, the secretary of the party and a member of the executive com-
mittee of the Communist International. Pollitt is a Marxian theorist
who, a boiler-maker by trade, is also a practical journalist and politician.
One of the most acute journalists in London told me that he considered
Pollitt’s “news-sense” to be better than his own. Pollitt worked hard for
a United Front in Britain but unsuccessfully. As an organizer of the
party, he receives its maximum salary, $20 per week.^

From several points of view the I.L.P. (Independent Labour Party)
is to the Left of the communists, as was the late P.O.U.M. in Spain. It
opposed sanctions, which the communists approved ; it refused any com-
pact with labor, and the labor machine fought it even on the Clydeside,
where it was impregnable. Four I.L.P. men sit in the present House ; it is
a small group, but noisy. The I.L.P. was founded as far back as 1893,
and in early days it had great influence on labor policy. In 1932, de-
voted to genuinely revolutionary tactics, it broke with labor.

The leader of the I.L.P., James Maxton, was once, like Litvinov, a
soldier ; he belonged to the territorials. His first instincts were conserva-
tive; the story is told in Glasgow that while Elliot was a Fabian,
Maxton was a Tory. Lean, with a famous mane of black-white hair, a
“cadaverous British Danton,” Maxton sardonically denounces the gov-
ernment for planning to spend $500,000,000 on road development — ^to

^ After the Russo-German pacts of 1939 Pollitt retired from secretaryship of the
British communist party.

INSIDE EUROPE

362

make them safer for the next hunger marchers. Maxton, a unique
personality, provides yet another British paradox ; he is an overt revolu-
tionary, yet is probably the most popular man in the House of Com-
mons. He was one of the few M.P.’s to oppose the war in 1939.

^^This Rock Shall Fly from its Firm Base as Soon as

On the extreme Right, far beyond even the Hailshams and London-
derrys, are two last-ditch imperialists, L. S. Amery, former minister
of colonies, and Lord Lloyd, once governor-general of Bombay and
high commissioner of Egypt. Amery has lately been conspicuous as the
leader of those M.P.'s most resolutely determined to block the possible
return of colonies to Germany. 'If I were asked to name the most con-
vinced die-hard among the great politicians of to-day,” wrote Robert
Bernays, "I should pass over the claims of Mr. Churchill and plump
for Mr. Amery. . . And thus he is out of office. Amery is diminutive,
pugnacious, a formidable debater, and like most top-flight English
politicians, a man of great intelligence and culture.

Lord Lloyd, whose tradition is that of Empire administration rather
than Westminster debate, traces his ancestry back to the princes who
ruled Dyfed (South Wales) nine hundred years ago. He was one of
Colonel Lawrence's early companions in the Arabian adventure. It was
he who first caused Gandhi to be arrested ; he lost his job in Egypt when
the conciliatory Arthur Henderson became labor's foreign minister. Like
Amery, he is an isolationist and an imperialist. As a pro-consul, he was
a famous martinet ; he believed in pomp. Once when the Prince of Wales
visited him in Bombay, His Royal Highness is reported to have mur-
mured, "I never knew how royalty lived until I stayed with George
Lloyd.”

Mosley

“Over the whole of this Abyssinian dispute rises the stink of oil, and stronger
than even the stink of oil is the stink o£ the Jews.”

— Mosley.

With Sir Oswald Mosley, Fascism became a thrice-told tale; it be-
came a watery English stew that compared to Italian Fascism as a soggy
British cabbage compares to the fiery authority of Italian wine. If the
other dictators of the age, Hitler and Mussolini, are boils and pimples,
as H. G. Wells expressed it, Oswald Mosley is a blackhead.

Mosley is ambitious. He is (he rather resembles Starhemberg) strik-

LEFT AND RIGHT IN ENGLAND 363

ingly handsome. He is probably the best orator in England. His per-
sonal magnetism is very great. He was competent enough intellectually
to draw into his camp, before he turned Fascist, some of the best young
minds in England, like John Strachey. Nevertheless, his movement
petered out. In the 1935 elections he did not run a single candidate. By
1939 he had become a half-forgotten combination of joke and menace.

In The Town Labourer J. L. and Barbara Hammond wrote: *Tn
1596 a Mr. Oswald Mosley . . . bought the land on which Manchester
now stands for £3,500. In 1846 the town of Manchester bought the
manor and all the rights and incidents from Sir Oswald Mosley for
£200,000. . .

The present Sir Oswald, the sixth baronet to bear the name, inher-
ited a fortune of $1,235,000 from the late baroness; from his grand-
father, who died in 1915, he received $300,000 more. He seems to have
been no great favorite with his father, who, in a letter to the newspapers,
wrote that ‘Tor many years I paid out of my own pocket thousands of
pounds for his education and upkeep. . . . He has never done an honest
day’s work in his life.”^ In 1920 he married Lady Cynthia Curzon, the
daughter of the late Lord Curzon and the granddaughter of Levi Leiter,
the Chicago millionaire ; she too was wealthy. At the wedding two kings
and two queens were present.

IMosley entered politics as conservative M.P. for Harrow, but pres-
ently became “independent.” There were several reasons for this. As a
rich young conservative, he was only one among many rich young con-
servatives. As an independent who was rich, other parties would be in-
terested in him. Finally, the Labour party was rising in influence, and
Mosley had strong ideas about economic reform. In 1924 he became a
laborite. “When my wife and I joined the labor movement,” he wrote,
“it meant a complete break with family and former associations.” This
plunge into proletarian existence had, however, its compensations. He
bought one of the most beautiful and ancient manor-houses in England
(price $45,000) and spent $50,000 rebuilding and furnishing it. Mean-
time, the toiling masses heard with interest that his wife wanted to be
called “plain Mrs. Mosley.” But when his father died, he assumed the
parental title.

In 1929, at the age of thirty-three, he went into the labor ministry as
chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. This job is a ministerial sinecure ;
Mosley was in effect a minister without portfolio to deal with unem-

® Mosley Fascism, published by the Labour Research Department, p. 3.

INSIDE EUROPE

364

ployment. Of his intelligence, his magnetism, there was no doubt. He
advocated a vigorous policy of public works ; but J. H. Thomas and the
stand-pat labor leaders rejected his “Mosley Memorandum.” He resigned
his post, and set about organizing a party of his own. Several laboi
people were tempted to join him, but when he formed his “New Party”
it had only five members in the House, and as his ideas became more
and more Fascist, his Left supporters dropped him. The New Party
had only one year of life, and in September, 1932, Mosley emerged
as leader of the B.UF., British Union of Fascists.

The movement is compact of all the familiar Fascist nostrums. Mosley
attacks the Bank of England and the Jews; he demands a strong policy
for India ; he appeals for support of the working classes by demagoguery
very much like Hitler’s ; he does not go so far as to threaten revolution,
but he hints that the “Gordian knot” must be cut ; he brings little fresh
salt to the Fascist pie. Arrogant, supercilious, dressed in black like a skat-
ing champion, he puts on a superb show ; but what he talks is mostly non-
sense. Spectacular, he organized his Black Shirts on more or less the
German model ; but at a great meeting at Olympia in 1934, rough-house
by his bodyguards seriously discredited the movement

Lord Rothermere backed him for a while ; following is the text of a
letter written from B.U.F. headquarters in London after the first big
article in the Daily Mail friendly to the Fascist movement :

“Strictly confidential and to be destroyed when read. To Branch or-
ganisers and Press Secretaries.

“Doubtless you have all read the stirring article by Viscount Rother-
mere in the Daily Mail of the 15th inst. ... It is desirable that there
shall be an expression of approval for the action of the Dody Mail and
an endorsement by its readers. To this end it is required of all branch
organisers and Press secretaries that they see that a number of letters be
sent to Editor from each branch. A dozen letters at least express-

ing approval and support of the sentiments of Viscount Rothermere’s
stirring article.

“It is suggested that the impulse for writing these letters by readers
of the DM. apparently be the attacks on Viscount Rothermere and his
group of papers by other organs of the Press. ... Of course these let-
ters are supposedly written by readers quite unconnected with the B.U.F.,
that they have been sympathetic toward Fascism but have been moved
to active support of this powerful article.

“If all^ branches act as it is their duty to act, Viscount Rothermere
will be given the impression that most of the country already is Fascist
and will assist our movement even more energetically for the Post Office

LEFT AND RIGHT IN ENGLAND 365

will have to use an extra van to convey the Northcliffe House mail dur-
ing the next day or two. Please put vim into this campaign

“Signed A. W. Ivens, O.C. Press Propaganda.”

On May ii, 1935, Mosley sent the following communication to Julius
Streicher, the S.A. boss of Nuremberg:

“Dear Herr Streicher, — I thank you very much for your telegram
regarding my speech at Leicester, which arrived in London during my
absence.

“I value this message of yours, in the midst of our hard fight, greatly.

“The might of Jewish corruption must be overcome in all great coun-
tries before the future of Europe can be assured in justice and in peace.

“Our fight is a difficult one. Our victory certain. I thank you. Yours
very faithfully, Mosley.”

— {Daily Herald, May ii, 1935*)

Sometimes, in view of his attack on the Jews, Mosley was heckled
by people who alluded to his wife’s Jewish blood. Arms akimbo, shoul-
ders arched back, he replied (on at least one occasion), “My wife is of
Dutch extraction.”

In 1939, as was inevitable, Mosley opposed the war. No one paid much
attention.

Chapter XXIII
De Valera

I IKE many modern chieftains, Eamon de Valera was not born a citizen
^ of the country he rules. Hitler, as we have seen, was an Austrian ;
Pilsudski was Lithuanian in origin, as well as Polish; Josef Stalin still
speaks with his native Georgian accent ; the late Kamal Ataturk was born
in Salonika, Greece, and Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, the former Austrian
chancellor, in Riva, Italy.

This is a demonstration, among other things, of the way frontiers
have danced about since the war, Salonika was still part of Turkey when
Kamal Ataturk was an infant ; Riva was part of Austria when Schusch-
nigg went to school. Eamon de Valera’s birthplace is separated from his
capital by 3,000 miles of ocean. He was born, in 1882, in New York; his
father was a Spanish immigrant from Cuba, his mother an Irishwoman
lately an arrival in America. De Valera’s American birth — and citizen-
ship-saved his life.

Whereas Austrianism has been something of an incumbrance to Hitler,
the fact that the Irish leader was American made him President of Ire-
land. For he was saved from execution after the Easter rebellion in 1916
purely because the British military tribunal had no wish to alienate
American opinion by shooting an American citizen. Almost every other
commandant in the rebellion was shot. Had he been born elsewhere than
in America, the history of the Irish Free State would have been very
different. Perhaps — ^it is quite possible — ^there would have been no Free
State at all.

Eamon de Valera is one of those rare statesmen, like Disraeli and
Theodore Roosevelt, who are blessed by a universally known nickname.
To everyone in Ireland de Valera is simply ‘*Dev.” This at once gives
some indication of his quality. The Irish are not particularly prone to
give nicknames ; Mr. Cosgrave never had one. A nationally used nick-
name indicates intimacy and affection ; it is a tribute worth thousands in
votes ; it is the ultimate in honors conferred upon a statesman by the lay
public. Mere demagoguery cannot win a nickname, nor can mere success,
no matter how great. Hitler has never been nicknamed, and neither was
Woodrow Wilson. But Theodore Roosevelt became “Teddy” or “T. R.’^

366

DE VALERA

367

and Mr. Lloyd George became “L G.” No one in his own country has
ever dared to nickname Mussolini or Kamal Ataturk. But everywhere in
Ireland Eamon de Valera is just **Dev.*’

Not many people however, call him “Dev’’ to his face. His wife does,
and those who are intimate enough to address him by his Christian name,
if it were commonly used. Some of his mother’s relatives in County
Limerick, where he was reared, still call him Eddie. His friends and col-
leagues usually say Chief, or if addressing him in Irish, Uachtaran
(President). He himself addresses most of his staff by their first names,
in their Irish form. But “Dev” is what people call him when he is not in
the room.

Ten years or so ago, when he was in opposition, known as “the Presi-
dent of the Republic” to his followers, the Cosgrave government intro-
duced a bill in the Dail Eireann (National Assembly) making it a serious
offense to use the title “President” to describe anybody but Mr. Cos-
grave, who was then president of the Executive Council. At a public
meeting in Dublin, one of the de Valerists, Countess Markievitz, rose
and said that she had never called the President of the Republic anything
but Dev, but that henceforth she would call Dev nothing but the Presi-
dent of the Republic. Whereupon the bill was dropped.

Like most men with a single-track mind, de Valera gets a lot of work
done He puts in a grueling day. Usually he arrives at his office in Gov-
ernment Buildings between 9 -30 and 10. He receives, as a rule, the heads
of all departments under his direct administration ; he scrupulously pays
attention to the smallest details. He returns home for luncheon and is in
the office again shortly afterwards. He works till six, goes home to tea,
and frequently returns to the office again at night. Often, passing Gov-
ernment Buildings, one may see lights in the President’s quarters till
after midnight. He has bread and butter for supper. He has never, ex-
cept for reasons of illness, taken a holiday.

He has the spare but rugged frame that fanatics need. He was a first-
class rugger player in his youth, and is still an excellent horseman, very
fond of riding. He likes to hike and climb. Almost every Sunday he may
be seen walking across a pass in the hills about ten miles from Dublin.
His car, empty except for the chauffeur and detectives, drives slowly
along; Dev walks behind it, very rapidly, hatless, his hair on end. His
clothes, even on this occasion, are usually black. Members of his family
have a hard time keeping up with him, so rapid is his pace. Behind are

INSIDE EUROPE

368

other detectives — members of a group of eight chosen men — ^who are
never far from his person.

He never touches a drop of any kind of alcohol in Ireland or England.
He believes drink — hard drink — ^to be the curse of his country. But, an
odd point, he drinks wine or beer when he is on the Continent. He likes
nothing better than to sit in a cafe in Zurich or Geneva sipping a glass
of beer and watching people He does not smoke. But until 1916 he was
a heavy smoker. The story is told that he filled his pipe and was about
to light it when, after the Easter rebellion, he was on his way to penal
servitude He stopped suddenly and said, *T will not let them deprive
me of this pleasure in jail!*" He threw away the pipe, and has never
smoked since.

His hobbies, apart from exercise, are chess, listening to the radio, and,
above ail, mathematics. He was an omnivorous reader until his eye com-
plaint grew serious. He especially read Shakespeare and the Gaelic
writers. He speaks Irish fluently and correctly, but with a strong gut-
tural accent. The intellectual pleasure that matters most to him is mathe-
matics. One day going to Rome he asked the secretary what he thought
of the quaternary theorem. “Nothing,** the secretary replied, who knew
only elementary mathematics. It was a boiling-hot day, and the rest of
the staff dozed, but Dev spent twelve solid hours teaching the secretary
the quaternary theorem. The secretary said that Dev*s twelve-hour lec-
ture was the most brilliant intellectual performance he had ever known.
When in jail in 1918, incidentally, de Valera spent all his time mastering
the Einstein theory.

His wife was a school-teacher, Sinead Ni Fhlannagain (Jeannie
0 *Flanagan), whom he met at the Gaelic League when he was learning
Irish. The legend is that de Valera was unable to enter the Civil Service
because he failed in his examinations in Gaelic; the story may be
apocryphal, and, anyway, Dev married his teacher. That was in 1910.
They had seven children. One boy, Brian, was killed riding in Phoenix
Park, Dublin, last February. The eldest boy, Vivian, has his Master of
Science degree from the National University of Ireland and is now a
demonstrator in University College, Dublin; he has also been gazetted
lieutenant in the National Volunteers. The eldest girl is also a graduate
of the National University. The younger children are still in secondary
school or college.

Mrs. de Valera was a beautiful fair girl. Her golden hair is now turn-
ing gray. She is reserved in character, like her husband. The family has

DE VALERA

369

almost no social life, except the minimum necessary for official func-
tions. When de Valera became President his wife said that she wished
the government would give him an official wife to tend to the official
entertaining. The de Valeras live in a simple house on Cross Avenue,
Blackrock. They have only one servant, a maid Before 1932 they had
no servants at all, and lived in a much smaller house ; Mrs. de Valera
did all the work. They entertained guests in the dining-room. Like all
the Irish, Mrs. de Valera has a long memory. The younger children
are clever and very popular in Blackrock. They have been invited to
parties by families who were desperate political opponents of de Valera
in the early days. Mrs. de Valera refuses the invitations on the ground
that the children are “too busy.'’

President de Valera is extremely accessible as a statesman and he re-
ceives a great number of people (Pie is very particular about newspaper
interviews, however ; everything must be checked and okayed by him )
He has many friends. One is a rich farmer doctor, by the name of Far-
nan. De Valera often visits him late at night and they take long walks to-
gether. Another is his secretary, Kathleen O'Connell. She has been with
the chief for almost twenty years, and knows his work and the method
of his mind inside out. De Valera is very attractive to women, but pays
no attention to them They follow him about at functions ; he is smiling
but reserved, and, without ever being rude or pompous, manages to
create a sense of distance between himself and them.

He has utterly no interest in money. He reduced his salary from
£2,500 to £1,500 on taking office. He has no private means, no expen-
sive hobbies, and no taste for luxury. He is very fond of music. His views
on art are unknown ; he does not appear to be much interested in graphic
art. He is, of course, extremely religious, but his Catholicism is neither
ostentatious nor bigoted; several of his friends are Protestant. When-
ever possible, de Valera is a daily communicant at Mass. As one of his
staff expressed to me, “His whole life is a prayer."

His sense of humor is hardly robust ; but it exists. It is on the ironic
side. He rarely makes jokes, but he appreciates comic situations, and
when he laughs, he laughs very heartily. Once he was arrested, at Ennis,
in the middle of a speech. A year later he was released. He went forth-
with to Ennis, and began to speak again with the words, “As I was saying
when I was interrupted "

His personal traits are clearly marked : rigid self-control ; fanatic faith
in his duty to Ireland; extreme seriousness of mind: complete unworld-

370

INSIDE EUROPE

liness ; a certain didacticism ; stubbornness and humanity. People say that
he has lost his temper publicly only once in his life ; it occurred during a
debate on the Irish Press bonds. Similarly his friends can recall only
very rare and isolated cases where he gave way to emotion. Once in
1921, when the Treaty had been ratified by seven votes, he got up and
said, ‘‘During these last four years we have worked together like
brothers . . then his voice broke and he sat down and cloaked his
face with his hands. He was intensely fond of his son Brian ; but imme-
diately after his tragic death he appeared at a party meeting quite calm.
When he enters a public place — ^for instance, the stands at a football
match — he does not smile or nod to the crowd. He walks straight ahead,
very reserved, and seems to pretend that the crowd is not there.

Eamon de Valera discovered Ireland at the age of two. His father
(in New York) died and he was dispatched to Ireland in the care of his
mother’s brother. He lived in his grandmother’s home near Bruree, in
County Limerick. His mother, who stayed in America, married again;
no one seems to know accurately how much contact there was between
mother and son during his early years. He went to the local school, living
meanwhile on a farm, and won a scholarship, owing to his skill at mathe-
matics, in a religious school near Cork. For a time he thought of entering
a Jesuit college. Instead he went to Blackrock College, near Dublin,
where his own children were subsequently educated. He got his degree
at the Royal University, learned Irish, became a teacher, and opened
his career as a nationalist and a revolutionary.

In many European countries to-day many young men follow roughly
the same pattern. In Jugoslavia, in Bulgaria, in Turkey, in Syria and
Egypt and Palestine, I have met young de Valeras of various breeds.
They may also — ^who knows? — ^become fathers of countries. Not many
have the great intellectual equipment de Valera possessed, and very few
can be his equals in force of character ; but the general type is the same.
Poverty in youth; the struggle for an education combined inextricably
with nationalism ; deep religious faith in many cases ; dedication of the
totality of life to a passionate desire for freedom. Many of the na-
tionalisms represented by these young men seem feeble and petty. The
hatreds they engender — that of a young Syrian for the French, for
instance, or a Croat for the Serb government in Belgrade — seem de-
plorable. But they are living factors in the Europe of to-day.

De Valera, from the beginning, was an extremist of extremists. It

DE VALERA

371

was inevitable that he should join Pearce, MacDonough, MacDermott,
and the others in the proclamation of the Irish Republic at Easter, 1916.
It was a mad adventure. It could not possibly succeed. It was sheer
suicide. So the level-headed ones said at the time. They were wrong.
The rebellion was put down by force of arms, true, after a week’s
fighting ; all the leaders except de Valera, true, were sentenced to death
and shot. But the Easter rebellion was not a failure. It was a success.
So at least de Valera would look at it. For out of its fire and bloodshed
came — ^after terribly tragic years — ^the Irish Free State, with himself
on top of it.

De Valera was one of the ^‘commandants” -who were charged with the
actual military operations, and his handful of men were in occupation
of a place outside Dublin called Boland s Mills. This was a key spot,
because the British had to pass it to reach Dublin from the sea. De
Valera’s men were the best trained, the best led, in the Irish army. The
British themselves conceded this. One of de Valera’s tricks was to station
a very few men, with a couple of machine-guns, in an outhouse from
which the Irish flag was flying This deceived the British into thinking
that it housed his main force. De Valera did not w^ant to surrender when
the revolt — inside Dublin — ^was crushed, but he obeyed his superior offi-
cers. He came out of Boland’s Mills to surrender, saying : “Shoot me if
you like. Let my men alone.”

He was sentenced to death by military tribunal, but the sentence was
commuted to life imprisonment when it became knowm that the leader
was an American. The British at the time were very anxious that
America should come into the "w ar on the side of the Allies ; the Irish-
American vote and sentiment were important. He spent only a year in
Dartmoor, because in 1917 there was a general amnesty. Promptly —
since most of the other republican leaders had been shot — ^he was elected
president of Sinn Fein. He was also Sinn Fein M.P. for Clare. He
never got a chance to sit at Westminster— of course he was an absten-
tionist and he would not have gone to London even if permitted — ^be-
cause early in 1918 he was again arrested, and this time sent to jail in
Lincoln.

About his escape from Lincoln there are many legends. The true
story appears to be this. He drew a grotesque picture on a post-card;
it showed a drunken man fitting an enormous key into a lock. The card
passed the censor, but its Irish recipient, dull-witted, put it away in a
drawer, thinking that Dev was of? his head. The picture, in reality, was

INSIDE EUROPE

372

an accurate drawing of the key to the prison yard. Later the friend
got another similarly grotesque post-card, this time depicting a smaller
key. The friend now saw what Dev meant. A key was made and smug-
gled in to de Valera. It did not fit. Then Dev managed to make a wax
cast of a key from a bit of candle. This was smuggled out ; later a key
blank and a file, concealed in a cake, were smuggled in. And one fine
evening Dev walked out of jail.

There was a tremendous man-hunt for him. De Valera got to Man-
chester and hid in the house of a priest. As he walked in, the priest had
been reading in the Bible the words, "‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto
you.’’ De Valera got to Liverpool, and made his way — ^with some diffi-
culty — ^to Ireland. One story is that he disguised himself as an ordinary
seaman, and was scrubbing the decks under the very feet of the de-
tectives who searched every boat for him ; another is that he was hidden
by a friend in the potato stores, was literally buried in potatoes till the
search was over. Then he went to America, disguised as a stoker. His
arrival in New York was a nine days’ wonder. The police were still
scouring England and Ireland for him. He spoke all over the United
States, raised money for the Irish cause, and established himself as the
undisputed spokesman of free Ireland.

He returned to Ireland to the tune of more narrow escapes and
adventures. He landed first in Liverpool, aboard the Celtic. He bribed
an officer of a tramp steamer to smuggle him into Ireland ; the fee was
£ 100. Whereupon the officer went ashore and got drunk. De Valera was
hidden in his cabin. The officer did not return as the ship was due to
sail. The captain, furious, came to his cabin to investigate. Thinking
quickly, de Valera pretended to be very drunk himself. After a tense
few moments, the captain dismissed him as a harmless if exhilarated
friend of his absent officer. And the ship sailed. Once in Ireland again —
this was in 1919 — ^history began.

It was history of a most disorderly, cruel, factional, and bloody kind.
The story has been told too often, and at too great length, to bear de-
tailed repetition here. De Valera was elected President of the Dail
Eireann, comprising the Sinn Fein deputies from Southern Ireland.
The de Valerists constituted themselves a national assembly, refused to
take oath to the King, and proclaimed their independence. Civil war
began; the Black-and-Tans and Irish nationalists slaughtered one an-
other, The war ended in a truce in July, 1921, and negotiations went
on for five months until the Irish Treaty was signed. This gave Ireland

DE VALERA

373

dominion status, but separated the Free State from Ulster. The de Valer-
ists split. De Valera, though the delegates who went to London were his
plenipotentiaries, disowned them and refused to accept the treaty. He
wanted more. He went into opposition; which meant that civil war
started once again.

It ended with mutual exhaustion, and in the spring of 1923 a Cease
Fire order stopped the bloodshed. De Valera and his group of followers,
now a minority, insisted that the treaty had been imposed on the Free
State by Lloyd George’s threat of war, and refused to sit in the Dail so
long as members took the oath to the King. In June, 1927, the Cosgrave
government passed a bill requiring that candidates for the Dail must, if
elected, promise to take their seats ; this brought de Valera and his forty-
three men into the Dail. A new election increased the strength to fifty-
seven. Finally, in 1932, he won a majority, by coalition with the Labour
party, and displaced Cosgrave as President. He went to the country in
1933 and got a clear majority — ^but a slight one — ^and has been in power
ever since.

When I saw de Valera a few years ago it was with the understanding
that I would not quote him directly on Irish affairs. It was not an inter-
view ; merely a brief chat. His office is a simple small room, with “Presi-
dent” printed in black on the frosted window. It resembled the kind of
room which a modest executive of a modest business might use. No par-
ticular decoration; no covey of secretaries; no swank. Just a big desk
next to a small window and a tall, gaunt man behind it.

De Valera looks less severe than his pictures. The long nose and the
deep lines to the mouth are his most characteristic features. He seemed
younger, I thought, than his fifty-four years. He was alert, interested,
and extremely courteous. He speaks with a perceptible brogue; words
like “that” or “this” come out with the “th’s” thickened.

I explained that I had recently been appointed London correspondent
of my newspaper and that this was my first visit to Ireland. I said that I
was very happy, after many years on the Continent, to be exploring
these new realms, and that life in the British Isles was most exciting.
My use of the term “British Isles” was an unconscious little slip, Mr,
de Valera did not allow it to go uncorrected. Quite soberly he smiled
and said that if I had meant to include Ireland in the British Isles, he
trusted that I did so only as a “geographical expression.” I explained
that my chief duty to my newspaper was to gain knowledge, background,

INSIDE EUROPE

374

education. "'Very well/" Mr. de Valera said. '"Let your instruction begin
at once.’" And he set out to explain the difference between Ireland and
the "British Isles."" Some moments later, having again necessity to de-
scribe my field of operations, I sought a phrase and said, after a slight
pause, "a group of islands in the northern part of Europe."" Mr. de
Valera sat back and laughed heartily. I hope he will not mind my telling
this little story.

The President thought that the most disconcerting thing about Europe
as a whole was the way people — ^good and intelligent people — ^had been
forced by the pressure of events to think of war as an inevitability. Five
years ago that was not true, he was inclined to think. War was something
that people feared, and which they hoped would not come. But nowa-
days it seemed that people considered war as the normal thing to expect.
He shook his head gravely, and said that if he had been born a German
or a Frenchman he would have devoted his whole life to trying to make
permanent peace between France and Germany.

Then Mr, de Valera turned to Ireland, and my "instruction"" began.
He was patient, explicit, and formidably, somberly reasonable. But in
that gaunt face I saw the eyes of a fanatic. When I left him, deeply
impressed by his terrific Irishness, I recalled the little story about his
first talk with Lloyd George. "How did you get along with de Valera?""
the Welshman was asked. "We have talked for two days,"" Lloyd George
sighed, "and he has got up to Brian Boru.""

Beyond the obvious things — ^tenacity, intelligence, and so on — ^it would
seem that a main source of de Valera"s power is his community with
people. His position — especially since the abolition of the Senate — is
virtually that of a dictator, but he is an unchallengeably firm democrat.
He believes in the people; his people believe in him. He said recently
that he did not think he would ever again have to take arms in his hands
and fight for Ireland, but that he would gladly fight — ^and die — ^for
democracy. His faith in the fundamental goodness and rightness of peo-
ple is profound. In 1933, however, he was quick to smash the Blueshirt
(Fascist) movement, because he was well aware that even the best of
people may be misled, and that the first duty of democracy is to protect
itself. Almost immediately on reaching power, it will be recalled, he
submitted himself to an election which he did not, technically, have to
hold. The instant his majority is lost, he will resign. In 1934 an organized
campaign against local rates and taxes began. Some of his friends ap-

DE VALERA

375

pealed for more vigorous action against saboteurs who were felling trees
across roads and cutting telegraph wires. ‘‘No,’* De Valera said. “Leave
them to the people. The people themselves will check them.”

The faith of the average Free Stater in De Valera is little short of
idolatrous. Way back in 1921, when it seemed that civil war was immi-
nent again, De Valera organized his volunteers. During a test mobiliza-
tion near Dublin a road mine was found to be defective. De Valera ex-
amined it, discovered what was wrong, and put it right “He’s a greater
soldier than Napoleon,” one of his men exclaimed. Now, however fine
a military amateur de Valera’ may be, the comparison is, of course,
ridiculous. “But it is a great thing,” the Irishman who told me this story
commented, “that a leader should have followers who really think of
comparing him to Napoleon.”

He is utterly without personal ambition. His only ambition is the unity
and self-determination of the Irish people. “It is not a question of what
I want,” he told an interviewer once, “but what the people of Ireland
want.”

Since reaching power De Valera has, as was inevitable, tweaked the
British lion’s tail. The Dail has abolished the oath of allegiance to the
King, greatly reduced the power and privileges of the governor-general,
denied the right of appeal from the Irish Supreme Court to the Privy
Council, and withheld the land annuities. These were payments of roughly
£5,000,000 per year by Ireland to Britain on account of loans during
the last century by which Irish tenant farmers purchased land. The
British retaliated by a prohibitive tariff on Irish goods, chiefly the
agricultural produce— cattle and milk and butter — ^which was the bulk
of Ireland’s export business. An economic war began, and still con-
tinues. As a result De Valera has had profoundly to change the texture
of Irish economic life. He has cut down imports, built sugar factories,
sown the land with wheat, and killed off his surplus cattle by trying to
encourage leather and meat-meal industries; in a word, he has been
forced by Britain to an experiment in self-sufficiency. How successful it
will be none can tell. The effort has been great, and the cost tremendous.

De Valera’s whole life has been dominated by one idea and ideal : a
united and independent Ireland. This he has not achieved. What he has
achieved is the creation of a Free State which, as it was aptly expressed,
is in the British Commonwealth, but not oj it. The Free State is a con-
promise between republican aspirations and the blunt realities of British
power. De Valera’s feeling is, perhaps, that a generation is very short in

INSIDE EUROPE

376

the life of mankind, and that the creation of the Free State is a beginning
that will develop to its proper end. He wants and needs only two things,
one of his friends told me — ^peace and time.

In April, 1937, the new constitution of the Irish Free State was pub-
lished, and m 1938 the Free State — ^having adopted the good old Irish
name of Eire — separated itself from the British Commonwealth, though
the sovereignty of the crown was recognized in matters of defense. Dr.
Douglas Hyde, the veteran man of letters, became first president of Eire,
with ]Mr. De Valera — ^who won an easy general election in June — ^as his
prime minister.

During 1939 severe outrages by members of the Irish Republican
Army took place throughout England. These Irish extremists go farther
even than Mr. De Valera in their desire to see the British out of Ireland
. . . When war came in 1939 De Valera announced that Eire would
remain strictly neutral. This produced a certain paradox. The British
Empire went to war with Germany, but not Eire.

Chepter XXIV
Danube Blues

The situation in Germany is serious hut not hopeless; the
situation in Austria is hopeless hut not serious^

— ^Viennese Saying

USTRIA is ruled/’ said old Viktor Adler, the founder of Viennese
social democracy, ''by Absolutism modified by SchlampcreiT I do
not know exactly how to translate this lovely Viennese word, Schlam-
perei, but roughly it means slovenliness plus a certain charm, provided
you do not lose your temper. Adler made his little joke many years ago;
despite the terrible trials Austria underwent after 1919, including the
two civil wars of 1934 and the Anschluss in 1938, it still holds good
to-day.

But Austria and its entrancing capital Vienna no longer represent
the undiluted joy of life of other days. The Fohn, that seductive and
enervating breeze from the Austrian Alps, the source of much of Menna’s
pervasive, exasperating charm, still blows — yes. The Viennese, a pro-
foundly civilized people, still drink gallons of beer and the best coffee
in the world, discussing placidly the really important things of life, like
Mozart and whipped cream — ^yes. But Austria is a Nazi country now.

We who lived in Vienna through the early and middle 30’s had to alter
our comfortable view that the Viennese were invariably shiftless, easy-
going, sophisticated, gentle. We found that some things, in the last
analysis, were more important to the Viennese than the first act of the
newest Jaray comedy, or the latest subtle embroidery on the theories of
Freud or Stekel We learned that the Balkans do, as Metternich said,
begin at Landstrasse Hauptstrasse. And so does Germany. Alas !

Austria before the union with Germany in 1938— which event I have
already described in Chapter VIII above — ^was a country roughly the
size of Maine or South Carolina, with a population of six and a half
million, something less than that of New York City. Before the war of

377

INSIDE EUROPE

378

1914 Austria-Hungary, with fifty million people, stretched from the Car-
pathians to the Adriatic ; the chief psychological problem of the country
in post-war years was adjustment to this shrinkage from imperial great-
ness to meager exiguity. The story of the two Tyroleans was well known.
^Tet’s take a walk,” one said, '^around Austria.” “No,” replied the other,
“I don't want to get back before lunch.”

The capital, Vienna, like a swollen head atop a dwarfed and shrunken
body, contained more than one-third of the country’s inhabitants, and
this acute disproportion was its chief economic problem after 1918. The
country had to import more than it exported ; it did not raise enough
to feed itself ; therefore it was very poor. Vienna, a gaping maw, swal-
lowed more than the mountainously beautiful but economically almost
useless hinterland could produce. The chief crop of provincial Austria
is — scenery.

The weakness of Austria was for a time its greatest strength. Until
1934 at least its foreign policy was largely one of gentle blackmail; it
demanded and got financial or political help from the other powers
because it was a buffer state in a key position, and if it collapsed the
whole Danube equilibrium would go to pot. A joke from Germany was
relevant. Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, discuss what they will do if the
Nazi regime crashes. Goering says: “I will wear civilian clothes, and
no one will recognize me.” Goebbels says, “I will keep my mouth shut,
and people will not know who I am.” But Hitler says he needs do
nothing: “I am an Austrian, and therefore the powers will have to
protect me.” Strangely ironic this seems now!

Austria is not only the pivot of the Danube, but the key to great
events far afield. In March, 1931, the German foreign minister Curtius
and the Austrian chancellor, an honest but dull-witted policeman. Dr.
Schober, suggested a Customs Union between their respective countries.
This, of course, aroused French rage, because the Quai d’Orsay saw it
as the first step to Anschluss, So the French withdrew credits from
Austrian banks and helped to provoke the collapse of Credit Anstalt, the
chief financial institution in Central Europe. Results : the German bank-
ing crisis, the reparations moratorium, the flight from sterling. Banks
crashed through Europe like tin pans down a concrete alley. A politico-
economic quarrel in remote Vienna, it was proved, could — and did —
shake Great Britain off gold. Confidence, betrayed by the pound sterling,
left the earth ; and it has not yet returned.

The disequilibrium between Marxist Vienna and the clerical country-

DANUBE BLUES

379

side was the dominating Motiv of Austrian politics until the rise of
Hitler. Vienna was socialist, anti-clerical, and, as a municipality, fairly
rich. The hinterland was poor, backward, conservative, Roman Catho-
lic, and jealous of Vienna's higher standard of living. The socialists, to
defend themselves in what they thought was their impregnable citadel,
founded a private army of young workmen and intellectuals, the Schutz-
bund. The countryside promptly countered with a similar army — ^but
recruited from primitive and hungry peasant lads, in leather breeches
and green hats — ^the Heimwehr. The struggle between these two forces
resulted in the civil war of February, 1934.

In Vienna the socialists produced a remarkable administration, mak-
ing it probably the most successful municipality in the world. By means
of an ingenious taxation system they financed paternalistic reforms of
unparalleled quantity and quality; they built health clinics, baths, gym-
nasia, sanatoria, schools, kindergartens, and the imposing sunshine
dwellings which, in decency and cleanliness if not luxury, housed sixty
thousand families — socialist families. They eliminated slums; they cut
down drastically the tuberculosis rate; they took money from the rich,
who could spare it, and used it for the benefit of the worthy poor. The
achievements of the Vienna socialists were the most exhilarating social
monument of the post-war period in any European country. Result : the
clericals bombed them out of existence.

Through the terrible years of poverty and deflation in the early
'thirties tension between the socialists and their opponents grew. The
Credit Anstalt crash cost the country one billion schillings, about
$140,000,000. The fall of agricultural prices in the Danube basin ruined
Austria's attenuated trade. The political structure of the country creaked
with strain. The socialists, with a cool forty-two per cent of the elec-
torate, were the largest political party, but they shut themselves up in
Vienna and turned their back on the country at large ; had they tried to
form a minority government— -because a coalition of all the other parties
could outvote them — ^there might have been civil war. Little Putsches,
instigated by the Heimwehr, did occur. Angrily tension increased.

The man in the street, sipping his coffee, dreaming of the great days
before the war, seemingly paid little attention to the crisis. Vienna's
familiar lassitude, product of the warm, sirocco-like Folin, enveloped
politics in a fog of languor. When the Customs Union and Credit
Anstalt stories raged across the front pages of the world, the Vienna
papers carried scare headlines — ^about the deficit in the Butq theater.

INSIDE EUROPE

380

Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal ; but Vienna is a woman. She
had no practical head for politics, especially her own politics. The plan
for a Danubian confederation got scarcely a yawn out of the Viennese —
but when Jeritza missed a high C in Tannhduser, the whole town rocked
with shame. The country was poor, but it still managed to subsidize the
Opera to the tune of $1,000,000 per year — so all was well.

Then two things happened to jerk Vienna from its pensive lethargy.
One was Dollfuss. The other Hitler.

Duodecimo Dictator

Dr. Engelbert Dollfuss, who had a vivid couple of years as the
political darling of Western Europe, the ‘'Millimetternich " — so called
because he was only four feet eleven inches high — ^the youngest and
littlest of the post-war dictators, was born in Texing, a village in
Lower Austria, on October 4, 1892. He was illegitimate. He worked
his way through school, studied law at the University of Vienna, and
when the war came served three years at the front. He went in a
private — ^in the famous Kaiserschutsen regiment — and came out a first
lieutenant, no small feat in the old imperial army.

Dollfuss was born a peasant and with belief in God. These were the
two paramount facts in his character. Much of his personal charm and
force came from his extreme simplicity of character; his modesty and
directness amounted almost to naivete. A foreigner approaching him
with a compliment would hear a broad farmer’s accent in reply, *'Ach —
aber gehen Sie'' (Oh, go on . . .). His speeches were extraordinarily
unsophisticated; he listened to speeches of members of his cabinet
who were experts in their field with the respectful attention of a child
in school. Speaking himself, he was tense, awkward, overworked. A
devout Catholic, his religious faith gave him something of the curious
innocence of old, wise priests, an innocence as impregnable to the wiles
of adversaries as the most glittering sophistication.

Of course his stature — or rather lack of it — ^helped him inordinately.
He became David to the Goliath of the Nazis. His diminutiveness
dramatized him into the heart of Austrian politics. He was a sort of
mascot. One could be angry with a six-footer, but a prime minister
barely five feet in his stocking-feet was irresistible. (These feelings
were, of course, blasted by the events of February, 1934, when he wrong-
headedly moved against the socialists.) Tiny physically, Dollfuss was not.

DANUBE BLUES 381

however, a dwarf. His smallness was shapely; all the features, diminutive,
were well formed.

The jokes about his size were famous. He broke his leg one day
falling off a ladder; he had been picking a dandelion. The police dis-
covered an attentat against his life; a mousetrap had been secreted in his
bedroom. Postage stamps were to be issued commemorating his vic-
tories, adorned with his portrait — ^life size. An Austrian physicist won
the Nobel prize for his experiments splitting the atom, with Dollfuss as
his subject. When agitated at night, he either paced up and down under
the bed or went skating on the frozen surface of his pot. He did not
take the train to Rome when he visited Mussolini; he was dispatched
air mail. When the chief of the staff of the Austrian army, reviewing
troops, was startled to see a turtle at the head of the formations, his
shock was quickly dispelled ; the turtle was the Herr Bundeskanelcr —
in a steel helmet.

Dollfuss entered politics as a member of the Christian Social (con-
servative) party, led by that astute cleric. Monsignor Ignaz Seipel.
The little man was interested in agriculture; he organized a peasants'
league in Lower Austria and presently became a deputy in the Austrian
parliament. The federal railways needed an agrarian expert and he
joined its administrative council ; in October, 1930, he became president
of the railways. In March, 193X, he got a cabinet post as minister of
agriculture. A year later an exasperating crisis provoked the resignation
of the Christian Social cabinet of Dr. Buresch. Dollfuss was asked to
form a new government. No one else would take the ticklish job, because
the party had a majority of only one in the chamber. Dollfuss prayed
all night before accepting. This was on May 20, 1932. He remained
prime minister until the Nazis murdered him a little over two years later.

No one, when he assumed the chancellorship, thought that he would
last long; no one, indeed, thought that he was of any consequence at
all. With a group of newspapermen I had lunch with him during the
first week of his rule. Earnest, shy, tired, excited, Dollfuss sat, smoked,
and talked till dusk. And we became aware that here might be a person
of original quality. Two main factors in his career became manifest
soon after: (i) his capacity to take immediate advantage of a situation,
(2) his sense of drama. Ratification of the Lausanne Loan^ which was

^Austria was nearing default on the 1923 League of Nations Reconstruction
Loan, which was guaranteed by the Powers. The Powers thereupon^ lent^ Austria
more money because they themselves would have had to pay the original investors
if default persisted. This was known as “saving” Austria.

INSIDE EUROPE

382

to bring 300,000,000 schillings to the country was up before parliament.
The socialists and pan-Germans opposed ratification. Early that morn-
ing Dr. Seipel died. Dollfuss’ majority of one had gone to heaven. So
the miniature chancellor promptly swore in a successor and dragooned
every member of his party, sick or well, to the chamber: one man was
carried in by three comrades, another came from a hospital swathed
in bandages. Dollfuss won — ^by one vote. And by such unconventional,
even tyrannical behavior! — exclaimed the Austrians, shocked and im-
pressed. A few weeks later another crucial vote impended. Dollfuss won
again, and again by a single vote. The missing adversary was the former
chancellor Dr. Schober — ^who had died the night before.

On March 4, 1933, the Austrian parliament committed suicide. It was
a marvelously, typically Viennese occasion. A socialist deputy, just before
an important vote, went out, as the phrase goes, to wash his hands.
A colleague voted for him, but carelessly inserted into the box an in-
correct ballot, one marked with his own name instead of that of the
missing deputy. The vote was eighty-one to eighty against the govern-
ment. The high-minded socialist speaker. Dr. Renner, announced, how-
ever, that an irregularity in the voting had occurred.^ Long did he regret
it. Because the chamber got excited and in the confusion Dr. Renner
so far lost his head as to resign and walk out of the meeting. The two
deputy speakers likewise resigned; the session ended in pandemonium.

Then clever Dr. Dollfuss discovered that legally the parliament could
not reconstitute itself, since by law only the speaker or deputy speakers
could call a session, and all three, having resigned, were powerless to
do so. It was a ridiculous little contretemps, but the Austrians are ex-
tremely legal-minded, and it ended parliamentarism in the country.
Dollfuss, like a bulldog, pounced on his opportunity He resigned office
— Shaving learned the good political lesson never to offer resignation until
you are indispensable — and was reappointed with emergency powers. On
March 7 a flood of decrees splashed on Vienna. People read them — and
discovered that Dollfuss was their dictator.

His luck, until the end, was always of phenomenal quality, but at
two-fifteen P.M. on October 3, 1933, the luckiest thing of all happened :
he was shot. At two-fourteen he was only a chancellor ; at two-sixteen,
he became a martyr, and a living martyr at that. Only good luck stood

* The issue was a motion asldng lenience for railway workers who a few days
before had gone on strike. The railway administration was hopelessly m debt and
could not pay the men their full wages. The workmen protested. For want of a few
thousand schillings in the railway cash box, parliamentarism in Austria expired.

DANUBE BLUES

383

between his heart and the two bullets fired at less than a yard’s range.
It was his great sense of occasion that made him deliver a radio speech
from his bedside which turned him into the world’s favorite conva-
lescent. The would-be assassin was discovered to be a slightly Van-der-
loony Nazi. How Hitler must have wanted to choke him for having
made a hero of his own worst enemy ! For the enormous and foreboding
shadow of the Nazis had begun to fall on Austria.

Marauders jrom the North

Hitler, who had become chancellor that year, wanted Austria for a
variety of reasons; he mentions the union of Austria and Germany in
the very first paragraph of Mein Kampf,

(1) Himself an Austrian, he viewed the little country’s “misbehavior”
as direct repudiation by his own people and thus an unforgivable assault
on his personal prestige.

(2) The pan-Germanism of the Nazis was bound to look ridiculous
as long as 6,500,000 Austrian Germans, directly contiguous to the Third
Reich, snickered at the Swastika instead of worshiping it.

(3) Germany badly needed a triumph in foreign policy, and a success-
ful assault on Austria would have cloaked possible discontent at home.

(4) Austria possessed valuable reserves of iron ore, the Eisenerz
deposit in Styria, which would compensate for Germany’s mineral star-
vation.

(5) If Austria became part of Germany, the MitteUEuropa dream
would begin to be realized : the dream of an encircled Czechoslovakia, of
a Nazi push into the broad plains of Hungary and beyond.

At the beginning Nazis within Austria represented only a very small
force. In the general election of November, 1930 — ^the last free election
held in Austria— they didn’t get a single seat, though Hitler at that
time in Germany commanded six million votes. But when Hitler became
chancellor, Naziism among Austrians, who are, after all, German,
steeply grew. Had the Nazis behaved less stupidly Austria might very
well have fallen into their lap without a struggle. Dollfuss, quarreling
with the socialists, was in a ticklish position ; his Heimwehr support was
unreliable; jealous clerical politicians -were undercutting him. And the
biggest Nazi card was Austrian defeatism ; the Austrians hated fighting
and their attitude was, more or less, “Oh, well, if the Germans want to
take us in and support us, why not?” But instead of waiting the Nazis
began an extraordinary campaign of terrorism and violence. This served

INSIDE EUROPE

3«4

to challenge Austria to stand on its own feet; it backed the country
against the wall of its own dormant patriotism. Then Hitlerism inside
Germany alienated large numbers of Austrian clericals, socialists, and
Jews.

Even so, as the full-dress campaign of the Nazis got under way,
Dollfuss faced formidable difficulties. Nazi violence in the form of
shootings, intimidations, assaults, bombings, slanders, libels, occurred
almost daily. The small but tough chancellor fought back. On May Day
he forbade the usual social democrat demo;istrations and to the amaze-
ment of the populace filled the Ringstrasse in Vienna with troops and
barbed wire — ^as a show of force. Then he expelled the Bavarian minis-
ter of justice. Dr. Frank, who was visiting the country on a speaking
tour. The Germans retaliated by imposing a i,ooo-mark fine on German
tourists to Austria, a serious blow to the tourist traffic ; Dollfuss retali-
ated by outlawing the Nazi party. In Berlin the Austrian press attache
was arrested and expelled. This happened the night before Dollfuss was
to address the London Economic Conference. The incident dramatized
his appearance and he got a great ovation. The Nazis countered with
more violence.

And then began a war, one of the queerest wars ever known any-
where, a war fought bloodlessly (except for casualties in minor border
frays) but a war nevertheless. The Nazis invaded Austria. They crossed
the frontier — ^through the air. Their planes dropped propaganda leaflets ;
their radio station in Munich, through the mouth of Herr Habicht,
Hitler’s ‘"inspector-general” for Austria, hurled speeches across the
ether. As Austrian Nazis fled Austria, they were organized on German
soil into an “Austrian legion,” the avowed aim of which was reconquest
of the homeland. Tension increased till the Great Powers found it in-
tolerable; France, Italy, and Great Britain joined to present a vigorous
demarche in Berlin, and for a time the Nazis quieted down.

Even so, at the end of 1933 things looked very dark for Dollfuss.

Protector from the South

Three developments of great importance then occurred. First, Musso-
lini took Dollfuss in his pocket and became to all intents and purposes
the Lord High Protector of Austria. This was because Italy could not
endure the thought of strong Prussians instead of weak Austrians on
the Brenner Pass, the frontier between Italy and Austria. If Austria
went Nazi, it would in effect mean that Germany was in the back yard

DANUBE BLUES

385

of Trieste and overlooking the fields of Lombardy, whereas it was then
a cardinal point in Italian policy to keep independent Austria as a buflfer
state between the Fascist giants. Moreover, there were two hundred thou-
sand German-speaking people in the South Tyrol— and the farther Ger-
many was away from them the better Mussolini liked it. Dollfuss visited
Mussolini three times. Their interests coincided.

Second, Dollfuss was forced to concede more and more authority to
the Heimwehr, led by a young aristocrat and freebooter, Prince Ernst
Rudiger von Starhemberg, and a tough Viennese ex-army officer. Major
Emil Fey. The Heimwehr, fnalignantly anti-socialist, became in effect
the private army of the Dollfuss regime. As price for its support, it
demanded more and more strenuous action against the social democrats.
Dollfuss dissolved the socialist Schutzbund ; he pm-pricked and heckled
the socialist leaders; he curtailed the financial privileges of the Vienna
municipality ; he gave way steadily to Heimwehr provocation. Moreover,
the Heimwehr was financed partly by Italy, with the result that Dollfuss
was doubly in Italian hands.

Third, Dollfuss, who had assumed five of the nine portfolios in the
Austrian cabinet, becoming a dictator in name as well as fact, announced
his intention to promulgate a new constitution reforming the state on
an authoritarian, Staendische (guild) basis. He borrowed the idea from
a papal encyclical, the Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, wherein Pope Pius
XI pleaded for the end of social strife and urged the adoption of a cor-
porate organization of society as a ‘‘cure” for class war. This meant, if
introduced full force, the end of trade unionism under socialist control ;
so the socialists fought it tooth and hammer. As an adjunct to the new
constitution, Dollfuss created the Vaterlaendische Front (Fatherland
Front), a national movement above the parties, grounded on a patriotic
basis. Mussolini approved both measures.

But the crisis with Germany got hot again. The equilibrium of
Austrian affairs was permanently shattered. Instead of the former tug
of war between two more or less equal opponents, socialists and clericals,
Dollfuss had to survive an angry triple struggle; the country became
divided into three groups, roughly approximate in power — socialists,
Nazis, and govemment-plus-Heimwehr. The dynamics of this struggle
were unpredictable. Dollfuss was in the Center, fighting both Left and
Right. If the Nazis and socialists had joined forces, he would have been
crushed. But hatred of Hitler by the socialists made a socialist-Nazi

INSIDE EUROPE

386

coalition impossible. Another danger then cropped up: the Nazis and
the Heimwehr — ^bad actors — ^started secret negotiations.

To ease himself from these predicaments, Dollfuss himself began
a flirtation with the Nazis. His policy had been consistently defensive;
he was willing to negotiate peace on the basis of independent Austria.
Hitler agreed to negotiation. The details were to be settled between
Dollfuss and Habicht, and on January 8, 1934, Habicht by terms of
the arrangement, stepped into a plane at Munich and headed for Vienna.
At the very last moment, Dollfuss — ^the explanation is that more Nazi
terrorism, contrary to the truce, occurred the night before — called off
the deal. Habicht was stopped in mid-air by radio.

The next week Signor Suvitch, Mussolini's under-secretary of state
for foreign affairs, arrived on an official visit to Vienna. He suggested
a new way out. The Austrian regime, attacked on both flanks, could not
possibly survive as it stood ; Dollfuss had to eliminate one of his enemies
in order to free himself to fight the other. Mussolini detested the
Austrian social democrats. They had exposed his smuggling of weapons
to Hungary in the Hirtenberg arms affair the year before. So the
Italians told Dollfuss to "solve” the problem by getting rid of the
socialists. "Liquidate the socialists somehow,” they said. This is the
true explanation of the terrible event that then took place — ^the February
civil war.

Chapter XXV

The February Tragedy

T he civil war, which echoed ominously in every chancellery in Europe,
was called a socialist “revolution’’ by the Dollfuss government. Just
as the Nazis in Germany tried to foist on the world the legend that they
saved the Reich from Marxism, so did the Dollfuss-Heimwehr-clerical
apologists explain that they used field artillery to kill women and chil-
dren in residential buildings, in order to crush a “Bolshevik insurrec-
tion.” This was, of course, not true. The tragic bloodshed of February 12
was the result of a cold-blooded Fascist (Heimwehr) coup d^etat. The
socialists resisted, certainly ; so did the Belgians when Germany crossed
the frontier in 1914. The Belgians may have fired the first shots, but
they didn’t start the war.

The government charged Dr. Otto Bauer and Col. Julius Deutsch,
the two leading socialists, with being Bolsheviks. The fact was that
their brand of social democracy saved Austria from Bolshevism in
1919 when both Bavaria and Hungary succumbed to communist regimes.
The government alleged that members of the socialist Schutzbund pos-
sessed illegal arms. They did indeed — arms which the government itself
gave them. It was conveniently forgotten that the Schutzbund was armed
as a defensive measure against Jugoslavia during a frontier crisis in
1920, and that for some years the Schutzbund and federal army held
the arms in common. The socialist tenements, the government said,
were “fortresses.” Of course Any modern building is a fortress as soon
as artillery starts to fire on it and if defenders with guns are within.

The Heimwehr, under Starhemberg and Major Fey, who was vice-
chancellor in the government, had violently threatened extirpation of
the socialists since 1927. A Heimwehr Putsch was averted in 1929 only
by the narrowest of margins, and in 1931 a Heimwehr rising in Styria
was put down by military action : Starhemberg was arrested and jailed.^
Then in 1932 Monsignor Seipel took the Heimwehr into his government,
and under Dollfuss the movement was blessed officially as an auxiliary
armed force. The socialists wrote their doom, not by aggression, but b}

^ And fined $27.50. See G E. R. Gedye's admirable book, Heirs to the Habsburgs,
P. lOS-

387

INSIDE EUROPE

388

temporizing, by seeking compromise. This was seized on by the Heimwehr
as a sign of weakness. The socialists wanted peace; but the Heimwehr
wanted war.

After the Habicht fiasco and the Suvitch visit the Heimwehr got
beyond control. Its leaders decided to force Dollfuss’ hand because the
little chancellor, afraid of bloodshed, seemed to be wavering. Conven-
iently, he went to Hungary on a state visit; it is unknown exactly to
what extent he encouraged what happened in his absence. The Heim-
wehr throughout Austria progressively ran wild through the provinces.
Let extracts from the chronology of the Bulletin of International News,
published by the Royal Institution of International Affairs, tell the story:

Jan. 31. The Heimwehr leaders presented the Governor of the Tyrol
with six demands which, if carried out, amounted to the establishment
of semi-military rule in the Province. . . . This followed the mobiliza-
tion of 8,000 Heimwehr on Jan. 30 to avert disorders threatened by
the Nazis.

Feb. 6. The leaders of the Upper Austria Heimwehr, supported
by the Patriotic Front, were understood to be making the same de-
mands as those in the Tyrol, and detachments of them occupied some
of the public buildings at Linz, the provincial capital.

Feb. 7. The Heimwehr leaders in Styria and the Burgenland sub-
mitted to the Provincial Governors at Graz and Eisenstadt demands
for a more authoritative government and a semi-military administration.

Feb. 8. The police raided the offices of the Arbeiter Zeitung. . . .
This was a sequel to the seizure a few days previously of arms and
explosives in buildings to which the socialists had access at Schwee-
hat. . . .

Feb. 9. The Heimwehr leaders in Salzburg presented authoritarian
demands to the Provincial Governor. The Governor of Lower Austria
was understood to have refused to see the local Heimwehr leaders, on
the ground that their demands were unconstitutional. Following on
reports that the Heimwehr were demanding of the Government the ban-
ning of the socialist party and the occupation of the Vienna City Hall,
the socialist headquarters intimated that any such action would be the
signal for a general strike. Herr Dollfuss returned from Budapest and
received the Heimwehr leaders.

Feb. 10. The vice-chancellor deprived the Mayor of Vienna (a Social
Democrat) and other City Officials of the authority to supervise matters
of public safety.

Feb. II. Speaking at a Heimwehr parade, attended by the minister
of war. Major Fey (the vice-chancellor) said, “In the last two days I
have made certain that Herr Dollfuss is with us. Tomorrow we are
going to clean up Austria” (Italics mine.)

THE FEBRUARY TRAGEDY 389

Major Fey was as good as his word. On February 12 the fighting
began.

GemutUchkeit Gone Wrong

At about eight-thirty that morning one of the local press agencies tele-
phoned me that fighting had broken out at Linz He had few details.
Apparently socialist workers resisted when Heimwehr guardsmen in-
vaded their premises. As early as February 7 I had concluded a dispatch
to my newspaper with the words ''civil war is possible.” But even on
the morning of the 12th I thought that there was still some hope that
Dollfuss would keep his head and avert a crisis. Otto Bauer had told me
not long before that he and Dollfuss would "negotiate.” I phoned the
Arbeiter Zeitung, the socialist newspaper, and got no reply. I rushed
out to pick up what information I could find, and returned home at about
eleven-thirty to write my story. At eleven-forty-five my wife said, *‘Try
to turn on the electric light.” I twiddled the button ; no light. General
strike !

So we thought, but as we learned later, the strike of the electrical
workers was not, alas, general. They had downed tools spontaneously
as word of fighting came from Linz. I noted the strangely quiet streets,
because the tramcars had stopped; most of the motormen and con-
ductors didn’t know why the current had snapped off; small, curious
crowds surrounded the stranded cars. (Later that day, we saw innumer-
able horse-drawn or motor-tractors pulling them along the dead rails
to the barns. . . .) At the Arbeiter Zeitung I learned that the police,
wearing steel helmets and armed with carbines, had evacuated the build-
ing. My wife and I with two friends drove hurriedly through the w’ork-
ing-class Ottakring and Hernals districts. We were nearing one of the
great municipal tenements when I heard for the first time in years that
unpleasantly brittle and discordant music — rifle fire.

The battle in Vienna lasted four days, and in the provinces five or six.
Almost a thousand men, women and children were killed. Nine socialist
leaders, including one man seriously wounded, and dragged to the gal-
lows from a stretcher, were hanged. The Karl Marx Hof and the
Goethe Hof were badly smashed by shell fire — ^two of the finest blocks
of workers’ dwellings in the world. I remember a scene in the Goethe
Hof a few hours after the bombardment. Mournful women and fright-
ened children stared miserably at the police. The simple, clean little flats
were blasted to bits by shells. I walked through the kindergarten. Desks>

INSIDE EUROPE

390

blackboards, school books, paint-boxes, shattered toys, were smashed
together with broken beams and fallen plaster. On one wall stood a
colored-paper design proudly inscribed with the name of its author, aged
six. A bullet had crashed through it. On the other wall, in this Marxist,
‘‘atheist’’ cathedral, was a lithograph of the Crucifixion. The glass was
shattered — ^by a Christian Social shell.

I did not see Dollfuss to talk to until the 22nd. When I mentioned
that Bauer and Deutsch, who, when the fight was hopeless, fled to
Czechoslovakia, had told me in Bratislava that they tried vainly to get in
touch with him on the morning of the I2fh, in order to avert bloodshed
by some last-minute compromise, the chancellor looked puzzled and
said, earnestly, blandly, that he had been at mass in St. Stephen’s when
the lights went out! — a signal that he could only interpret as the call
for a general strike. On the afternoon of the 13th, incidentally, when
fighting was at its hottest, Dollfuss spent a quiet hour having tea with
the Papal Nuncio

The spoils of victory for Dollfuss and the Heimwehr were tre-
mendous. Literally not since the Turks had there been such loot. The
socialist municipality owned about thirty-five per cent of the land of
Vienna; it employed fifty-four thousand people and was by far the
largest enterprise in Central Europe ; from 1923 to 1929 it spent about
$110,000,000 on housing and similar projects, and its funds in the
municipal savings banks alone were about $70,000,000. It collected about
$25,000,000 in taxes per year, and it owned the municipal gas works,
the electrical plants, the street-cars and subways and omnibuses, the
slaughter-houses and the public baths, a cemetery, a brewery, a bakery,
and a big department store. All this went into government hands. Thou-
sands of people were arrested, and thousands lost their jobs ; the social
disorganization resulting from the outbreak was tremendous.

Socialist Side

The secret history of the socialist end of the ^‘revolt^’ has never been
fully told. One vitally important factor in the conflict was the bitter per-
sonal enmity between Bauer, the socialist leader, and Dollfuss.

Otto Bauer, a brilliantly cultivated Jew of fifty-five, was the brains
of the social democratic party. A gentleman-politician, Bauer acted as
he thought British gentlemen-politicians acted; and he idealized them
slightly. He was honest, he was scrupulous, he was fair. An intellectual
in the best and worse senses of the word, he composed sound theories,

THE FEBRUARY TRAGEDY 391

but was utterly inadequate to meet an unforeseen situation, the im-
portance or even the existence of which he would proceed to belittle or
deny. Dollfuss, on the other hand, was about as theoretical as a flea;
he hopped from place to place by instinct.

Bauer, in judgments of people, was far from sound. He had had an
exaggerated admiration for the intellect of Monsignor Seipel, whom
he called an enemy worthy of his pen; the politics he liked were
polemical debates between himself on the front page of the Arbeiter
Zeitung and Seipel in the Reichspost. And Bauer underestimated Doll-
fuss seriously. He called him a fool. And Dollfuss, cunning as a peasant,
charming as a child, was very far from being a fool. Openly in the
chamber Bauer denounced the chancellor as a liar and ^^Schuff* (scoun-
drel) . Dollfuss never forgave him. A simpler man might have eliminated
Bauer by maneuvering him from the leadership of the party, but the
chancellor was too subtle for that; he knew the party was more im-
portant to Bauer than his own position and that he would not greatly
care what happened to him so long as the party went on; therefore
Dollfuss decided that the party had to go, and Bauer with it

Behind this first-rate personal quarrel was, of course, the critically
difficult position of the socialists both ideologically and politically. Ortho-
dox Seconde Internationale socialism was, in 1934, as old-fashioned as
horse-cars. Flattened between the opposites of Fascism and communism,
the socialists became, instead of a revolutionary party, a party of the
middle. They represented workers in work; and after some years of
comfortable, almost bourgeois living in the Engels Hof or the Goethe
Hof they lost a good deal of revolutionary fervor; they were not so
anxious as before to man the barricades.

Socialism lost out in Austria because of its own decency. The social-
ists hated bloodshed and violence; they could not believe that their
enemies were capable of ruthlessness and treachery; innocently they
believed the lies of their opponents, because their own characters were
grounded on probity and truth.

“Tactically, the socialists were in a hopeless position,” Frances Gun-
ther wrote at *he time. “As socialists, they believed in the dictatorship
of the proletariat. As democrats, they believed in the tolerant rule of the
majority. Through the gap between these two stools they crashed. They
socialized some of the luxuries of life, but none of the necessities. Back
in 1919 they had a chan^'e to acquire the Alpine Montangesellschaft, the
pivot of Austrian industry ; they let it go, and instead built lovely swim-

INSIDE JbUROPE

392

ming-pools and gardens for Vienna kiddies, by means of taxes which
were just and therefore doubly intolerable to the former upper classes.
Militarily, they succeeded in arming themselves — ^as socialists. But as
democrats, they failed to disarm their enemies.”

From 1932 on Bauer and his men were pressed closer and closer
against the wall. The Dollfuss technique was to whittle away their ad-
vantages, but never give them a square issue to fight on. Unemployment
and the growth of the economic crisis had made use of the supreme
socialist weapon, the general strike, more and more dangerous. The
quintessence of unrealism and decency, Bauer — ^who, after all, com-
manded the largest party in the country, with sixty per cent of the
Vienna electorate — offered to let Dollfuss rule dictatorially for two
years, provided only the steering committee of parliament kept in opera-
tion. Dollfuss refused. The socialists seventeen different times offered to
disarm the Schutzbund if the government would disarm the Heimwehr.
Dollfuss made no categorical answer, but simply kept Bauer dangling.
Finally the socialists announced the four things which would cause a
general strike: (i) imposition on Austria of a Fascist constitution, (2)
installation of a government commissar in Vienna, (3) dissolution of
the social democratic party, (4) dissolution of the trade unions. Doll-
fuss simply pasted these four items in his hat, gleeful ; he knew that he
must merely avoid these major provocations and the fight was won.

Bauer himself generously — ^too generously — ^admitted his error. Writ-
ing (Austrian Democracy Under Fire, p. 42) of the death of parliament,
he says :

'‘We could have responded on March 15 (1933) by calling a general
strike. Never were the conditions for a successful strike so favorable as
on that day. The counter-revolution which was just then reaching its full
development in Germany had aroused the Austrian masses. The masses
of the workers were awaiting the signal for battle. The railwaymen were
not yet so crushed as they were eleven months later. The government’s
military organization was far weaker than m February, 1934. At that
time we might have won.

“But we shrank back dismayed from the battle. We still believed that
we should be able to reach a peaceful settlement by negotiation. Dollfuss
had promised to negotiate with us at an early date . . . and we were still
fools enough to trust a promise of Dollfuss. We postponed the fight
because we wanted to spare the country the disaster of a bloody civil
war. The civil war, nevertheless, broke out eleven months later, but
under conditions that were considerably less favorable to ourselves. It
was a mistake— the most fatal of all our mistakes.”

THE FEBRUARY TRAGEDY

393

Confusion Worse Confounded

On the night of February ii— the day before the outbreak— Bauer
md his wife and two friends went, of all places, to the movies, where
hey saw Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel. Thus was the ‘‘Bolshevist plotter”
uaking ready for the “revolution” ! Returning home, he found a message
rom the leader of the Schutzbund in Linz, a man named Bernacek
mnouncing that he, Bernacek, would resist by force the Heimwehr
ittack expected for the morrow. Bauer, agitated, sent Bernacek the
ollowing telegram, apppealing to him not to provoke action : auntie's
\LL RIGHT BOTH THE DOCTORS AND UNCLE OTTO THINK THAT NOTHING
SHOULD BE DONE AT THIS MOMENT. Bemacek, a hothead, contemptuous
)f Bauer's caution, disregarded this message, and next day, defending
limself, he took to arms.

What happened then was one of the ghastliest muddles in revolution-
iry history.

Bauer got news at about eight-thirty of the bloodshed in Linz. He
summoned a meeting of the Aktions-Ausschuss (executive committee)
)f the trade unions and the party. A vote to call a general strike was
:arried by a majority of only one. Meantime, the workers in the power-
ul electrical union, inflamed, infuriated, preferring death fighting to
ieath by slow suffocation, had — ^without orders — ^already struck. Then a
errible thing occurred. The general strike manifesto was rushed to the
4rbeiter Zeitung presses for publication. But no contact had been estab-
ished between the electrical workers and the Arheiter Zeitung building,
vhere the committee met. At the very moment that printing of the
nanifesto was to begin, the presses stopped. The electrical workers had
shut off the power * So the call for a general strike was never promul-
gated, because of an unofficial strike of men who should have been an
issential part of the general strike.

It appears that the general strike was set for 5 P.M. The idea was
o bluff the government. What it did was give the government seven
precious hours of warning, Bauer and Deutsch went to Schutzbund
leadquarters to direct operations in the field, but other prominent social-
sts waited upon the government to appeal once more for conciliation,
general Koemer, a Schutzbund executive, went to see President Mik-
as ,* a group of Right-wing socialists, led by Dr. Renner, called on the
governor of Lower Austria to ask him to intervene with Doll fuss for
hem. (They did not go to Dollfuss direct; they hated him too much.

INSIDE EUROPE

394

and they knew he wouldn’t see them.) The government did what any
hard-boiled government would do. Conveniently the whole leadership
of the party, Bauer and Deutsch excepted, were in the lions’ den and
the authorities simply arrested the lot. Koerner was arrested actually
in Miklas’s anteroom, and the others — ^including the socialist journalist
Braunthal who was simply covering the story — ^were bagged in bulk.
The only socialist who behaved with sense and dignity was the veteran
mayor of Vienna, Karl Seitz, who stuck to his desk in the town hall
like a captain on the bridge of a battleship, and was finally dragged off
by force.

The strike was a terrible failure. Everything that could possibly go
wrong went wrong. Of course no one counted on the relentless acumen
and energy of Dollfuss and Fey. By mid-afternoon, every important
socialist leader was in jail. Anticipating this the party had appointed
second and third men for each post ; they were all arrested too. As a result
no one remained to give orders. The signal for the strike was to be the
stoppage of the trains. But the railwaymen did not stop the trains, be-
cause they never knew a strike had been officially declared. Couriers
were sent out — too late — ^to rouse the countryside. Most of them were
caught. A liaison committee had been set up in advance for communica-
tion between fighters and staff. It never met, because of a childish
inaccuracy in the location of the rendezvous.

The fighting that followed was simple heartbreak. I saw most of it.
The misorganization was pitiful. Bauer, a stern disciplinarian, had ossi-
fied the party, so that young men eager to go on the streets obediently
waited all day Monday and even till Tuesday, expecting orders to fight.
The orders never came ; the young men then began shooting and were
slaughtered. As early as February 3 the government — assisted by a
turncoat Schutzbunder Korbel, who sold secrets of the organization —
had arrested a group of key Schutzbund leaders. Most of the workers
did not know where their arms were hidden. Only a few men in each
district were cognizant of the location of the secret depots. The conse-
quence was that young Schutzbunders I knew dug with their hands all
Monday and Tuesday nights in the courtyards of their tenements, search-
ing wildly for the arms that they knew were there. They never found
them.

One band of three hundred Schutzbunders never received arms be-
cause the second-in-command refused to disclose their location without
orders from above, even though he must have known that his superior

THE FEBRUARY TRAGEDY

393

had been arrested. Another man I know could have machine-gunned a
whale detachment of police, but the rule was that no socialist should fire
until fired upon ; so my machine-gunner had to wait till the police were
nicely in position and ready for attack. The government cut key
telephones so that no communication was possible between one be-
sieged tenement and the others. Workers in one house fought with no
idea whether their comrades were keeping up the battle or not. And the
government maintained over the radio a stream of lies and slander —
for instance that Bauer and Deufsch had walked off wdth the trade union
funds.

One can say what one likes about the leadership of the party. But
about the valiant courage of the men there can be no doubt. It took a
modem army of nineteen thousand men, equipped with machine-guns,
armored cars, and field artillery, four whole days to crush the resistance
of perhaps five thousand forlorn and desperate Schutzbunders, their
backs to the wall or their necks in the noose. It was a hopeless fight,
but it was magnificent. The workers of the world will never forget the
February heroism of the Vienna proletariat.

^^Down Thou Climbing Sorrow T

After February Dollfuss promulgated the new corporative constitu-
tion. The old parliament, comatose, was revived so that it could com-
mit legal suicide. An extraordinary document, the constitution made
one think that Austria was going to be in the twentieth century what it
had been in the nineteenth — ^the heart and soul of European reaction.
The last vestiges of free popular suffrage disappeared. Way was
opened for a Habsburg restoration. A chamber chosen on a guild basis
replaced the old parliament. And the preamble to the constitution an-
nounced that all the 'lights” of the Austrian people derived from God.

But more mundane affairs preoccupied the little chancellor. A con-
fusing period of inner rivalries and shifts of power began, concurrently
between Dollfuss and Starhemberg for control of the country and
between Starhemberg and Fey for control of the Heimwehr. Fearful
that the Heimwehr was too powerful, Dollfuss encouraged the growth
of another private army, the extreme clerical and monarchist Sturm--
scharen of the minister of justice Dr. Schuschnigg. The Heimwehr,^

^ One of the most popular anecdotes of the period described two Heimwehr men
who met two others. The first two said after they separated, “I wonder if those
two Nazis know that we are socialists.*^

396 INSIDE EUROPE

angry, flirted with the Nazis. And on the honey of these confusions the
Nazis fed like bees.

From February to midsummer Dollfuss, desperately needing all
energy for settlement, was unexpectedly tender to the Nazis, his worst
enemies. A new campaign of violence began. Time and time again he
threatened to hang a Nazi terrorist; he never did. Reasons: (i) he
feared retaliation; (2) he was sabotaged by his own civil service; (3)
he didn’t want to make martyrs of Nazi criminals ; (4) he wanted — still
— ^to leave the way open for negotiations with Germany.

Events promptly showed that the Nazis were the chief beneficiaries
of February. The Mussolini-Suvitch plan turned out all wrong. Instead
of strengthening himself by the murder of the socialists, Dollfuss was
disastrously weakened, because he had destroyed the political morale of
the country. The Nazis were delighted that he had done their own job
for them in removing the working-class movement which was the best
defense of democracy. Socialists down! Nazis up! Nevertheless, Mus-
solini’s support kept Dollfuss in.

For five months there was an uneasy lull, punctuated steadily by Nazi
bombs. Then, on July 25, 1934, civil war again struck Austria. A socialist
lad wounded a policeman m a scuffle and the authorities chose to make
an example of him ; it was a splendid chance to make good the threats
of the death penalty and at the same time avoid the danger of Nazi venge-
ance. The boy, Josef Gerl, was hanged on July 24. This event did not
directly precipitate the Nazi revolt. But within twenty hours Dollfuss
himself was dead. He hanged a socialist, and, illogical as it seems, the
Nazis killed him.

Chdpter XXVI
Death of Dollfuss

T he murder of Dollfuss in 1934 marked the entrance of gangsterism
into European politics on an international basis. On June 30, inside
Germany, the Nazis imitated A 1 Capone, and on July 25 these methods
crossed into a neighboring land. The assassination was a deliberate
exercise in policy ; the Nazis had to murder Dollfuss because every other
method to defeat him failed. The story of the Dollfuss killing is that of
an organized conspiracy to murder.

All the Putschists seem to have been members of the eighty-ninth SS
regiment, one of four SS (Hitlerite guard) detachments which secretly
existed on Austrian soil. The rank and file of the plotters were former
non-commissioned officers or privates of the regular Austrian army who
had been dismissed from the service for their Nazi sympathies. Also
among them were active officers of the Vienna police whose surreptitious
Nazi activities had escaped detection — ^an extremely important point.

The plotters looked for support in three directions, (i) In Germany
there were Frauen f eld and Habicht, the exiled leaders of the Austrian
section of the Nazi party. (2) In Vienna there was a group of high
police executives and officials who were later arrested or fled the country.
(3) In Rome there was ‘‘King Anton” Rintelen. There was another
leader, a mysterious civilian whose nom-de~complot was Kunze, of whom
more later.

Dr. Anton Rintelen, a white-cropped man of fifty-eight, who looked
less like a conspirator than almost anyone I ever met, was promoted by
Dollfuss to be Austrian minister in Rome in order to get him out of
the country. He was too powerful to be overtly sacked. For ten years
Rintelen had been governor of Styria, the turbulent province south of
Vienna. He was clever and cold and ambitious and, though named by
the Nazis to be their chancellor, he was not a Nazi, He was Rintelen.
Years before he flirted with the socialists, hoping to reach power by a
socialist coalition. When the socialists faded and the Nazis rose he
intrigued with the Nazis. It is not the least of the ironies of July 25th that
this chief actor should have been motivated by aims so crass. He ran
with the Nazis not because he loved Hitler but because he wanted a

397

INSIDE EUROPE

398

job and loved power. The Nazis, on their side, needed him. He was
'‘respectable” and they knew they could most easily gain Austria
through the medium of a transitory coalition government. Rintelen
was to be the Austrian Papen.

Various Styrian industrialists were friends of Rintelen. In their fac-
tories, like the Alpine Montangesellschaft, the largest industrial concern
in Austria, the workmen were secretly organized on an SA basis. Here
the Styrian rebels hid their arms.

Germany fed the springs of dissatisfaction and treachery with a
powerful stream of gold; for instance it spent 75,000,000 marks in
Austria for propaganda in the seventeen months between January,
I933> and July, 1934. Of German moral responsibility for the Dollfuss
murder there was no doubt, Munich day in, day out, preached violence.
And plenty of indication of German foreknowledge of the actual
plot may be cited. As witness :

(1) The Munich headquarters of the Nazi party, according to the
official Wiener Zeitung^ had a special airplane ready at nine A.M. on the
25th for the victorious flight of Habicht and Frauenfeld to Vienna.

(2) As early as July 21st, a Berlin photo agency sent out pictures
of Rintelen marked “New Austrian Chancellor — Hold for Release.”

(3) A Nazi named Abereger, arrested in Innsbruck and later sen-
tenced to life imprisonment for bomb smuggling, testified that on July
22nd, three days before the murder, he was informed by courier from
Munich that an armed rising was scheduled in Austria for the 25th.

(4) Italian secret agents reported movements of the Austrian Legion
(Austrian Nazis on German soil) to the frontier on the evening of the
24th. The Legion was to take posts two miles behind the border.

(5) Most striking of all, the official German news agency, the
Deutsches Nachrichten Buro, issued at ten-forty-five A.M, on July 25th
instructions to all German papers to use only official German accounts
of the news anticipated from Austria that day. Later this same agency
prepared and distributed a story of the "successful” Austrian revolt,
although at this time the Putsch had barely started.

The Nazis were in a hurry because Dollfuss planned to visit Musso-
lini in Riccioni, an Italian seaside resort, later that week, and they feared
that some new agreement between Mussolini and Dollfuss would finally
beat them. One story is that the Putsch was first planned for July 24th,
but was postponed a day when secret information came to the plotters
that Dollfuss' last cabinet session in Austria would take place on the

DEATH OF DOLLFUSS

399

25th, not on the 24th as first believed. It was the intention of the con-
spirators to capture the whole cabinet. Rintelen had arrived in Vienna
from Rome on July 23rd, ostensibly on a holiday.

So much for the setting. The actual events of July 25th began as
follows :

At about eleven A M. the conspirators assembled at various points in
the streets of Vienna. Their organization was excellent and they acted
with the utmost smoothness and precision. One group gathered, man
by man, on the sidewalk of the Kolowrat Ring. They had received
weapons from their leaders the night before, and some had found cards
in their letter boxes notifying them of the rendezvous. Not all the plot-
ters knew who the higher-ups were ; the password was the number ‘'89 ”
Fourteen started from the Kolowrat Ring for Ravag, the radio headquar-
ters, where the signal for the Putsch was given. They were not disguised
and they went on foot Loitering on the Johannesgasse, where Ravag is
situated, were two uniformed policemen, members of the gang, who
“covered*" them and led them to the door.

A larger group meantime assembled at the gymnasium of the German
Athletic Club on Siebensterngasse. This building, it is interesting to
note, directly adjoins an army barracks. The plot had been organized
with such sureness that one of the conspirators confessed later to having
been informed by open telegram where to come and what to do. The
group numbered one hundred and forty-four, of whom no fewer than
one hundred and six were former army non-coms or privates, and ten
were active police. The hour of attack was chosen with beautiful pre-
cision so that the plotters would reach the chancellery at the moment
of the changing of the guard, when it was most vulnerable

At about ten A.M. a police officer named Dobler who was also a prom-
inent (secret) Nazi turned traitor to the Nazis and in a very be-
fuddled and Viennese way betrayed the plot to the authorities.^ Had
they acted promptly, Dollfuss would never have been shot. But the
police who were loyal had been fatigued by a plethora of false alarms,
and the disloyal police sabotaged attempts to take precautions.

Dobler’s movements that morning form a fascinating record. Trying
to notify the authorities without giving himself away, he and inter-
mediaries of the most astoundingly fortuitous variety succeeded, between

1 Dobler later committed suicide or was murdered by either loyal or Nazi police.
The full story is in the official Austrian version of the events, translated into
English as The Death of Dollfuss.

400

INSIDE EUROPE

ten and eleven-thirty, in holding meetings with public officials in at least
three different — of course — coffee-houses. By about eleven-fifteen Major
Wrabel, the aide-de-camp to Major Fey, minister of public security,
had heard the gist of the matter. He sent a trusted detective, Marek, to
Siebensterngasse to investigate. Fey seems to have been informed,
^'rather vaguely,’' at eleven-forty-five. He acted promptly and at once
informed the cabinet, but it was too late.

The detective, Marek, arrived at the Siebensterngasse barracks and
saw the plotters, but the presence of uniformed police threw him off
the track. The whole plot was made possible by the factor of disguise.
Nevertheless his suspicions grew and three times he telephoned to
Wrabel between twelve-ten and twelve-thirty, once from a public phone-
booth, once from a coffee-house, once from a furniture shop. Wrabel
transmitted the alarm to the public security officials, but police head-
quarters were only informed later. Meantime loyal police had been
misled by clever and daring spies who reported that an attack on Doll-
fuss was being prepared in a different part of town.

After his third call Marek was seized by the conspirators. He was
dragged into the hall, where he saw the men changing into army
uniform, the uniform of the crack Vienna Deutschmeister regiment.
The rebels clambered into three private trucks which they had hired,
one marked BUTTER AND EGGS, and started for the chancellery.
They did not know what to do with Marek and so (amazing cheek)
they took him with them. When they were a block from the chancellery
Marek jumped out, and none of the Nazis, for fear of raising the
alarm, dared shoot him. The reader may well ask how three trucks
full of “soldiers” could traverse a dozen blocks of a crowded city
at noon without attracting attention; but troop movements were not
uncommon in Vienna at this time, and the uniformed police on the
running-boards allayed suspicion.

The plotters reached the chancellery at twelve-fifty-three P.M. The
scene was set for dramatic and terrible events. But first there is the
Ravag episode to tell.

Revolt on the Ether

July 25th was a hot day, though not sunny, and I wanted to go swim-
ming. I had finished my morning’s work, and put on my hat to leave for
lunch when at seven minutes past one the telephone rang. One of my
tipsters said in a low voice, “Have you heard the radio? The Vienna

DEATH OF DOLLFUSS

401

radio has just made this announcement: ‘The government of Dr. Doll^
fuss has resigned. Dr. Rintelen has assumed power. ^ It may be a joke,
I don't know. Til check it up and call in a minute.'’

I put in a call for Paris at once (we sent our stories by phone) and
while waiting for it I telephoned (a) the American legation, (b) a
friend, M. W. Fodor, of the Manchester Guardian, with whom I worked
closely, (c) the Bundeskanzleramt or chancellery. The legation had
heard the radio announcement and was investigating. Fodor rushed to
meet me downtown. The Bundeskanzleramt — ^interesting! — did not an-
swer. Then Telegrafen-Compaghie, a local news service, called with the
radio announcement and said that a Nazi Putsch was in progress. I wrote
a brief story and finished it just when the Paris call came through. It
was one-nineteen. I still had my hat on.

I lost about ten minutes because a police officer stopped me and made
me drive him to his headquarters. A general alarm had been sounded,
he said, but he didn't know about what. I got to the Bundeskanzleramt
at about one-thirty-five. The tawny oak doors were shut and a few
policemen were outside, but otherwise nothing seemed wrong. I assumed
that the government had locked itself in, preparing defense.

An armored car passed by and with a couple of other newspapermen
I followed in pursuit. It turned away from the Bundeskanzleramt and
lurched round the Ring to the Johannesgasse, the Ravag headquarters.
The locale is comparable to Forty-third or Forty-fourth street in New
York. The car got into position and the police on the turret ducked inside
the steel shell. Then I heard revolver-shooting and machine-gun fire.
The police were storming Ravag to blast out the Nazi Putschists there,
I had a feeling that it was all monstrously unreal. The police pushed us
back, but we were eager to see ; it isn't often you get a pitched battle in
the heart of downtown Vienna. Then PRPRPRFFBUM we heard ex-
ploding hand-grenades. A waiter in a white-duck jacket slid through the
crowd with a platter of beers.

What had happened at Ravag was this. At tw^o minutes to one the
fourteen plotters from Kolowrat Ring entered the building. They shot
the loyal policeman on guard and the chauffeur of the Ravag director
who were lounging in the doorway. Four Nazis reached the studio,
where a broadcast of phonograph records was going on. They grabbed
the announcer, put a gun in his ribs, and made him give their message*
This was the signal for the Putsch. All over Austria it throbbed

But a courageous telephone girl had had time to sound an alarm.

402

INSIDE EUROPE

although all the lines to police headquarters — ^an interesting point —
were ‘‘busy/' And an official with great presence of mind cut the wires
to Bisamberg, the sending station, so that the Nazis were unable to give
a second message. Their plan had been to repeat “Dollf uss has resigned ;
Rintelen is chancellor" every ten minutes, interspersing this aerial tattoo
with instructions to the country, false news, and so on, which would
have paralyzed any defense action of the government. I remember that
a British radio expert told me years before how marvelously a revolu-
tion might be organized by radio.

An unfortunate actor rehearsing a broadcast skit became hysterical
with excitement, started to scream, and was shot. The police broke into
the building and another policeman was killed, also the Nazi leader. Of
the five who died, three bled to death because no doctor was available.
Outside we waited till the police, victorious, began to drag out their
captives at about three-twenty. I proceeded home and wrote my story,
longer this time, and put in my Paris call.

I went to the Bundeskanzleramt again at about three-fifty. On the
way I ran into G, E R. Gedye of the New York Times, who was return-
ing from Ravag, and we stopped a second, both saying, “Well, it seems
to be all over." We certainly were wrong, but very few people knew
then that anything was amiss except at Ravag. I had passed the Bundes-
kanzleramt myself before, and it looked entirely normal except for the
closed doors. Feeling a flicker of doubt, I said to Gedye, “You know, a
government doesn't usually lock itself in at a moment of great crisis."
He agreed. “Funny.” And we remembered that the phone had not an-
swered. I walked toward the building. A patrol had been flung aroimd
the area and I couldn't get in. Then the story burst.

Policy by Murder

The Bundeskanzleramt, or Federal Chancellery, is the old Metternich
palace where the Congress of Vienna met in 1815. Certainly from that
day to this it can have witnessed no more dramatic and agitated a situa-
tion. A stately baroque building, its cream-colored faqade opens on the
Ballhausplatz. Grilled balconies of graceful iron project twenty feet
over the sidewalk. Directly opposite is a post office built into the heavy
walls of the Hof burg, the former imperial palace, and on the west side
a high gate leads to the green meadow of the Burg garden.

The hundred and forty-four Nazis from Siebensterngasse, sweeping
into the courtyard, had seized those members of the government within.

DEATH OF DOLLFUSS 403

Dollfuss, Fey, and Fey’s assistant Karwinsky, and about one hundred
and fifty members of the staff, civil servants, clerks, and so on. The
guards in the building, sixty of them, suspected nothing or at least put
up no resistance and were disarmed and arrested. The police plotters
knew well the corridors and rooms of the complicated building (some
of them, indeed, had previously been posted there on duty), and the
occupation was quick and thorough. The analogy for America would be
the seizure of the White House, since the Bundeskanzleramt was the
central ganglion of government in Austria.

Nothing whatever of these events was known to the small group out-
side the building. Among the newspapermen who, having heard the
radio signal, had arrived by one-fifteen and stayed till nightfall were
Nypels of the Amsterdam Algemeen Handelsblad, Diez of the New
York Herald-Tribune, Werner of the A.P., two Hungarians, one
Albanian, and one Czech. They did not succumb to the temptation to
follow the armored car which led me away to Ravag. They saw the
whole story, and from a correlation of their records I made the follow-
ing chronology.

The very first arrival on Ballhausplatz after Nypels was a tail blond
youthful German photographer, who — ^remarkable coincidence if coinci-
dence it was — ^had arrived in Vienna from Berlin the day before. Calmly
he set up his tripod. At one-twenty-five some plain-clothes detectives
and four uniformed police wearing steel helmets and carrying rifles
arrived. A shout pierced the basement window, *‘Go away or we shoot.”
At one-fifty-five a Heimwehr lieutenant arrived, unarmed and alone,
and smashed his fists against the door, shouting with quixotic magnifi-
cence, ‘T give you five minutes to open the door, or I will blow it up.”
This gesture accomplished, he went away and was not seen again.

(Dollfuss was already bleeding to death by this time, the blood pump-
ing from the hole in his throat, but no one knew. . . .)

Several other officers arrived, looked about, decided that nothing was
wrong, and went away again. Traffic was still entirely normal. Then,
at five minutes past two, came Dr. Funder, the venerable editor of the
government organ Reichspost, A voice from inside was heard, '*Machen
Sie sich keine Sorgen!^ (Don’t be alarmed.) ‘‘Rintelen is chancellor and
a new police chief is coming from Berlin.” Funder hurried away. Many
Heimwehr men and police had now arrived. At about two-thirty began a
series of ultimatums that lasted the whole day. A Heimwehr officer
knocked on the door at two-thirty-five and said, give you twenty

INSIDE EUROPE

404

minutes and then we blow up the building/' “Go away or we shoot/' a
voice, distorted and hollow, answered through the door. The impression
was now general that the whole government had been taken prisoner.

At three o'clock Major Baar, a Heimwehr officer and vice-governor
of Lower Austria, arrived. A police officer told him, “I don't know
what to do. I was awaiting reenforcements and orders." The Heimwehr
were now massed along the road to the Burg Theater, but the police
pushed them back. “Who is inside?" Baar was asked. He answered,
“Dollfuss, Fey, and Karwinsky are inside, prisoners of the Putschists.
A new government has been formed and is meeting at the war ministry
on Stubenring." Police reenforcements came and a courteous officer said,
“Look here, gentlemen, this is not a good place to stand because here
you are in the direct line of fire." At three-forty-five traffic was finally
stopped and the little group of onlookers were a compact island in the
broad empty pond of the square.

At three-fifty-seven Major Fey, who has a face like a battle-ax,
appeared for the first time on the balcony. He was pale as paper. He
wrung his hands as if to free them from dust on the doorhandle. With
him was Holzweber, the leader of the rebels, a bespectacled little man
who looked like a clerk on a stool despite his captain's uniform, blazing
with decorations. The crowd started to shout, and Fey called in a low
voice, '^Ruhe!^^ (Quiet)

Everyone thought at once, “It is a Putsch made by Fey and the regu-
lar army,"

Fey called, “Where is the commandant?" He could not be found,
but a policeman walked up and saluted respectfully. “Who are you?"
Fey asked, “I am Captain Eibel, awaiting orders," the policeman said.
Holzweber whispered to Fey and Fey said, “Come without weapons to
the back door." Eibel nodded and Holzweber called after him, “Be
sure you are without arms and come alone."

Heimwehr men in the square had recognized Fey and they began to
shout, “Fey! Our Fey!"

At eight minutes past four Eibel returned from the back door on
Metastasiogasse. He was running hard, his helmet was ofif, and his hair
was damp and disorderly. He grabbed an open alarm phone. Everyone
heard what he said, talking to headquarters :

“I've been inside. I've spoken with Fey. The Bundeskanzler [Doll-
fuss] is apparently badly wounded. He has resigned. There is a new
government, and Fey remains vice-chancellor." Headquarters asked

DEATH OF DOLLFUSS

405

something and Eibel replied, “They are disciplined and look like the
military. The staff of the chancellery, one hundred and fifty men and
women, are under guard in the courtyard.”

By this time the commandant, Hofrat Humpel, had turned up and he
said to Eibel, “If the chancellor is wounded he should have a physician.
Run to the back door and offer to bring a doctor.” Eibel came back : “I
knocked and the sentry said, ‘No need for a physician any more.* ** So it
was known to this limited group that the chancellor was dead.

At four-twenty Fey appeared on the balcony again, Holzweber at his
elbow. The idea that it was a Putsch with Fey in charge was exploded
because obviously Holzweber was in command and giving Fey orders.
Fey called, '^Ruhe!” (Quiet.) Then, bending over the balcony, he called,
“Where is Rintelen?** The Heimwehr started to shout to the Nazis
inside :

“Woe to you if you harm our Fey. Touch our Fey, and we will hang
every one of you on these trees.**

Fey shouted: ^'Nichts unternehmen! (Take no action.) Nothing may
be done until I give the order. I am in command here ** He beckoned
to Humpel and ordered him around to the back door. A big Heimwehr
man, just under the balcony, crossed his hands like a seat and gestured
to Fey to jump. Humpel came back in about twenty minutes and shouted,
“Rintelen is chancellor, Fey is vice-chancellor. They are waiting for
Rintelen, who will come in a few minutes.**

On the Balcony

But it was not Rintelen who came ; it was quite another person. Neu-
stadter-Sturmer, a member of Dolfuss* cabinet. He waited a few mo-
ments and then Fey appeared on the balcony again and called, “Where
is Rintelen?*’

Neustadter-Stiirmer shouted, standing in the street, ^^Rintelen kommt
nichtr (Rintelen is not coming.)

Astonished, Fey turned to Holzweber at his elbow and a Heimwehr
man called, “Shall we storm the building?”

Fey shouted down : “No, nothing is to be done. Take no action with-
out my orders.”

Neustadter-Stiirmer answered : “A new government has been formed
and I represent it. In the name of the government I promise a safe
conduct to the rebels. They will be conducted to the German frontier.
If you do not surrender in twenty minutes we storm the building.”

INSIDE EUROPE

406

Fey called: *‘No. You will not storm the building. I am state secretary
of public security and you are to take no action without my authority.^'

Neustadter-Sturmer, looking up (sharply) : '‘Sie vrren Sich, Herr
Fey! (You are mistaken.) The members of the government who are
prisoners are under duress and not competent to give orders. It is now
five-twenty-eight. At five-forty-eight the building will be stormed.”

When the ultimatum expired everyone took cover, but there was no
shooting. Neustadter-Stiirmer kept pacing up and down and Fey had
disappeared. “It was just an Austrian ultimatum,” someone joked. But
the tension was terrific. At four minutes past six Fey came out again
and said that the rebels agreed to surrender but asked what guaranty
there was of safe conduct. They wanted military protection to the border.
“That can be arranged,” Neustadter-Stiirmer replied, and Fey, speak-
ing for Hudl (another rebel on the balcony), called, “Can we have fif-
teen minutes more ?” A civilian shouted, “They mustn't harm anyone in
the building.”

At six-thirty Fey came out once more. He tried to talk to General
Zehner, the under-secretary of state for war, who had taken charge.
There was such a tumult that no one could hear. Police, journalists,
Heimwehr, lookers-on were all under the balcony, shouting. So Zehner
and Neustadter-Stiirmer went round to meet Fey at the back door. Then
Dr. Reith, the German minister, arrived. At about five-fifty Zehner
reappeared and announced, “They will get military protection to the
frontier under the command of a staff officer.”

At about seven-thirty Fey came out the back door. He walked up
to Neustadter-Stiirmer and said, “Give me a cigarette.” A journalist
called, “P/m on their safe-conduct!” Fey, lifting his voice with effort,
said, “Quiet !” Neustadter-Stiirmer asked him, “Is it true that Dollfuss
is dead?” Fey said: “Yes, I spoke to him just before he died. When I
came in he was lying on a divan wounded and bleeding.” He crushed
the cigarette in his hand and said, “Give me another cigarette.”

At seven-forty Reith and Karwinsky came out. Schuschnigg, the new
prime minister, arrived and led Fey, Zehner, and Neustadter-Stiirmer
into the Burg garden. The police closed the gates behind them and,
standing there on the grass, in the dusk, they held a cabinet meeting.
By now twenty military trucks were lined up along the Ballhaus. and
police streamed into the building to disarm the rebels and conduct them
to the frontier. The rebels came out cocky and confident. Everyone

DEATH OF DOLLFUSS 407

thought their free passage to Germany was assured. They thought so
too. But they were wrong.

Death

Dollfuss had opened his last cabinet meeting at eleven. Among the
items on the agenda were — of all things — ^regulations governing a fa-
mous Vienna theater devoted to comic opera. The warning did not reach
the cabinet till after eleven. Vienna Schlamperei, as well as treason, is
probably responsible for the fact that the chancellery doors were not
shut in time. Once he got the alarm, Dollfuss acted with great energy
and coolness. He dismissed the cabinet and ordered the ministers to
scatter to their separate offices, only Fey and Karwinsky remaining. This
saved Austria, because if Schuschnigg and Neustadter-Sturmer had not
been outside the building the Putsch would probably have succeeded.

By twelve-fifty-five the rebels were inside the gates, one hundred and
forty-four of them. *‘We arrest you in the name of President Miklas,’^
they falsely shouted.

Officials at the chancellery told me the next day that they first thought
a surprise military drill was in progress. The uniforms seemed genuine
and the men were disciplined. Then, along each tier of offices, rude
voices shouted : “Come out ! Hands up Doors were battered down and
the staff herded into the courtyard. The more prominent officials were
imprisoned in a small room and told that they were the first batch of
hostages who would be shot if the plot miscarried. A second batch was
then chosen to be shot after the first batch. It became clear that the men
were Nazis when the first thing they did was to open the telephone
switchboard to get in touch with the German legation. And one rebel
told a friend of mine: “Curious, are you? In half an hour you’ll hear
all about it on the Munich radio.”

Immediately on disarming the guard one detachment of rebels went
up the main staircase, ignoring other objectives, to search the state de-
partments, find Dollfuss, and murder him. There is little doubt but that
this group was specifically charged with this duty. It was led by an
ex-corporal in the army, Otto Planetta, with a chin like a boxing-glove
Dollfuss was given no chance to escape. He might easily, like Fey and
the others, have been captured alive. But the rebels had one predominant
aim, to kill him. They entered the building at twelve-fifty-five and two
minutes past one at the latest he was shot.

Having dismissed the cabinet, Dollfuss retired to his private study, a

INSIDE EUROPE

408

small room papered in yellow silk. His valet, Hedvicek, looked out of the
window and saw the rebel trucks unloading in the courtyard He told
Dollfuss to try to escape through a passage that led through the com-
plicated web of archives rooms upstairs. Briskly the chancellor left the
yellow room and started across an oyster-white room toward the famous
congress hall. The oyster-white room has three doors. One gives on the
main staircase, and here the rebels entered. The door to the congress
hall was locked and Hedvicek fumbled with the key. Dollfuss, a small
man, reached for the knob and at a range of about twenty inches
Planetta shot him in the exposed armpit. The chancellor reeled and
Planetta fired again, this time in the throat, at about a distance of eight
inches. The chancellor fell. (^‘How his head cracked on the floor!”
Hedvicek said.)

^'Hilfej Hilfe!'' Dollfuss muttered. (“Help, help.”)

Planetta said, “Stand up.”

“I cannot,” Dollfuss whispered.

They picked him up and laid him on the rose-and-cream Louis XV
divan. Servants were still sucking up the dust and blood with vacuum
cleaners when I saw the room next morning. On the embroidery of the
divan were three large blood spots, almost exactly the shape and color of
large oak leaves.

Fey, who was detained near by, had heard the shots but did not know
their meaning. At about two-thirty a group of Nazis summoned him
and led him to the room where Dollfuss was still dying. The chancellor
recognized him and whispered weakly:

“I charge you to take care of my family if I die.”

The rebels had a revolver in Fey’s ribs and permitted him to say
nothing Dollfuss went on, very faintly:

“Where is Schuschnigg

Fey shook his head and, mustering strength, Dollfuss whispered,
“Try to settle this without bloodshed. Tell Rintelen to make peace.”

Fey was hustled out of the room He appealed to the rebels to get a
doctor or at least a priest. They refused, although they asked the
prisoners if a doctor were among them, and one of them gave the dying
chancellor a glass of water. Dollfuss must have thought he had been
betrayed by his own army ; not only that the Putsch had succeeded, but
that his own men had killed him. Later he apparently believed that loyal
troops, not rebels, were surrounding him, staring at his shrunken face,
because he whispered, ‘‘Kinder [children], you are so good to me. Why

DEATH OF DOLLFUSS

409

are the others not as you are? I wanted only peace. May God forgive
the others.’' The last blood was now streaming from his small body. A
basin to catch it was put under the divan. At three-forty-five he died.

The rebels thought they had won, until about five P.M. At four-thirty
Hudl, the second in command, told the prisoners in the courtyard that
a new government had been formed and that Rintelen, the new chan-
cellor, would arrive at once. Thereupon about twenty officials gave him
the Hitler salute and others called out, ''Heil Hitler.” Hudl testified at
his trial that Wrabel, who w^ caught inside the building, gave him his
card and said, “Call me (The familiar form of the second person.)

After five, when Neustadter-Sturmer was outside, the morale of the
rebels began to break. Holzweber went to Fey and said frankly : “There
has been some hitch. I do not know what to do.” Fey shrugged. Then, a
characteristically Viennese touch, Holzweber proceeded, “Aah! I shall
telephone the Cafe Files and ask if Herr Kunze is there.” So with the
chancellor dead, the government disrupted, Austria convulsed, and
Europe at the ragged edge of war, the leader of the rebels rang up a
coffee-house, to ask if a man who might be there could tell him what
to do.

Kunze was a civilian who had been at Siebenstemgasse. Holzweber
led the first truck and Hudl the second and Kunze was to have been in
the third. But he never arrived. No one knows for sure what happened
to him or how he disappeared. The Viennese police think he was a Nazi
lawyer who ratted at the extreme last moment, fled to Germany.

At about six the rebels decided to surrender, following the promise
of safe conduct. All the one hundred and fifty hostages would be shot,
Holzweber declared, if free passage was not given. Fey said to the gov-
ernment negotiator, “Do not allow considerations of my safety to influ-
ence you one way or another.” Then Hudl suggested telephoning to Dr.
Reith, the German minister, as witness for the safe conduct. Fey ex-
plained the business over the telephone, and Reith asked him whether
or not to come. Fey said, “It is not my business to give you orders or
dissuade you. I have only to pass on these men’s demand.” Reith came,
the negotiations were completed, and the exodus began.

Still the mass of the imprisoned hostages did not know the chancellor
was dead. Leaving the building, one of the rebels called out, “We’ve
left a dead one in the comer room upstairs.” An official rushed up and
found Dollfuss there. The body had completely shriveled like a raisin
and was clammy blue. The face was uncovered and wore an expression

410

INSIDE EUROPE

o£ extremest agony. A piece of canvas covered part of the body. There
was a terrible wound in the throat. Underneath the divan, spilled beyond
the basin, was a lake of blood.

The Missing Chief

And now about Rintelen. Why did Rintelen not come? Why did the
Putsch fail?

He did not come because he was arrested. He was arrested not by
the police or government, but by his old friend Dr. Funder, the editor of
the Reichspost, who, leaving the chancellery at ten minutes past two,
went straight to the Hotel Imperial where Rintelen was staying and on
his own responsibility persuaded him to give himself up at the war
ministry, in order to avert scandal. Owing to his position as a minister
he was not searched. It is said that the Ravag got through to Rintelen
at about one-fifty and asked him to deny the radio report naming him
chancellor. 'T have no authority to do that,^' Rintelen answered, and
rang off. At midnight that night he shot himself. The wound was not
mortal, though so dangerous that the actual heart had to be stitched up.

About the position of Fey there will probably be dispute as long as
the story is told. I do not think he knew anything about this particular
plot. But if he was not a traitor, he behaved like a poltroon. No one
knows exactly what passed between Fey and the rebels when they first
arrested him; but the evidence of both police officers who entered the
building is that they understood that Fey, with Dollfuss dead hardly a
minute, was vice-chancellor in the new Rintelen regime. On the other
hand. Fey can hardly be blamed for telling the loyalist forces not to
bombard the building. He had not only his own life to save but he was
responsible for the safety of the one hundred and fifty other prisoners.
If Fey had shouted early in the afternoon, “They have murdered the
chancellor; storm the building even if we die,’’ it would have been a
magnificent gesture but it would have cost much bloodshed. One must
remember that Fey knew nothing of what was going on outside. He
thought Rintelen was chancellor. Even so, if he had greeted Neustadter-
Stiirmer’s appearance with a whisper of pleasure instead of a reiterated
demand for Rintelen his reputation for loyalty and courage would not
have suffered such a severe setback.

There was much bad feeling about the withdrawal of the safe conduct.
The rebels were shipped, not to the German frontier, but to the Marokan-
ner police barracks hardly a mile away. The government defended what

DEATH OF DOLLFUSS

was certainly bad faith by saying (a) Fey was not authorized to give
a safe conduct, and (6) Neustadter-Sturmer gave it unaware that the
rump cabinet at five o’clock made it conditional on no casualties. I imag-
ine the final decision not to free the Nazis was taken at the cabinet
meeting outside the chancellery at seven-thirty. Here Schuschnigg was
informed for the first time of the circumstances of Dollfuss’ death and
he decided simply not to let the murderers go. Neustadter-Sturmer said
at Holzweber’s trial: '*Yes, I gave my soldier’s word of honor. But a
soldier’s word of honor is given to other soldiers, not to men who deny
medical aid and priestly services to a mortally wounded man.”

Another reason for the failure of the Putsch was that the country as
a whole did not rise. In Styria and Carinthia, where the Nazis had arms,
there was severe but brief fighting, but nowhere else. For a year all of
us were deluded into believing that the N^zis were fifty or sixty per
cent of the country. Possibly this was true, but at the critical mo-
ment the Nazis did not take action. The rebel signal had reverberated
through the land; for four hours there was no regular government;
but nothing happened. The Nazis had not bothered to arm their adher-
ents, feeling sure that the army would mutiny and provide weapons;
but the army remained loyal. Thus they lost their supreme chance.

Above all, the Putsch failed because Hitler welshed. The one hundred
and forty-four conspirators were betrayed three times on July 25th;
by their own higher-ups, chiefly Kunze; by the promise of safe conduct;
above all, by Germany. For a year and a half the Germans had incited
their Austrian cousins to violence and rebellion and then, at the crisis,
they let them down. The Austrian Legion did not march; instead, as
soon as the Putsch was seen to have failed, it was disbanded, Habicht
was dismissed from his post as Hitler’s “Inspector” for Austria, and
Frauenfeld disappeared. Dr. Reith was summarily fired, to give way to
Franz von Papen. Instantly it was known that Mussolini had mobilized
and would march into Austria if the Putsch succeeded, and this was
clear by six P.M. of the 25th, the Germans wretchedly crawled and
washed their hands of the whole business, and ever since have sought
to evade responsibility.

Thirteen of the Putschists were hanged, including four of the traitorous
policemen, and, of course, Holzweber and Planetta. I have seldom seen
a court-room more stirred than when Holzweber, just before his sen-
tence, rose and said :

“I was assured that there would be no bloodshed. I was told that I

INSIDE EUROPE

412

should find Rintelen at the chancellery and that the new government
was already formed. Not meeting the leader of the operation at the
chancellery, I disclosed myself at once to Major Fey. I told him, ‘Here
I stand, and I do not know what to do.’ ”

Three hours later he and Planetta were hanged. Both died bravely,
and both with the words, ''Heil Hitler,” on their lips. But Hitler did not
hear them. In East Prussia President von Hindenburg was dying. And
Hitler was busy becoming President of Germany.

Rintelen, seven months later, went on trial and was sentenced to life
imprisonment on a charge of high treason. After serving a brief time in
the penitentiary he was transferred to a sanatorium, under police sur-
veillance. The evidence against him at the trial was not particularly
concrete. As a result rumors rose that Rintelen had come to Vienna
expecting to take part in a different revolt against Dollfuss, in which
Fey too allegedly was involved. The July 25 Putsch was, it was said,
made by Habicht, to forestall a Rintelen-Fey Putsch scheduled for about
the same time. Habicht in Munich distrusted the Rintelen-Fey group,
even though — according to this story — it was to pave the way for a Nazi
regime; therefore Habicht jumped the gun on July 25 and therefore
Fey, Rintelen, and company, not knowing whether the Putsch going on
was their Putsch or not, behaved with such confusion.

Rintelen might have been acquitted except for the evidence of his
Italian servant Ripoldi, who testified that his master in Rome had fre-
quently consorted with alleged Nazi emissaries. This contributed an
obscure, bizarre footnote to the whole affair. Ripoldi had previously been
the valet of a friend of Rintelen’s, the financier Camillio Castiglione.
He admitted in court that Castiglione had persuaded him to telegraph
the court from Milan about his knowledge of Rintelen’s doings, and had
paid for the telegram.

Castiglione was born in Trieste, the son of a rabbi ; he made enormous
profits during the war selling airplanes ; after the war he was Europe’s
greatest speculator in foreign exchanges ; in his great days he rebuilt the
Josefstaedter Theater for Max Reinhardt, helped finance the Salzburg
festival, and paid some of Mussolini’s bills for the March on Rome. He
had been a close friend of Rintelen’s for many years. Then these two
cronies, buccaneers both, must have fallen out. The bond of their mutual
interests snapped. Castiglione put Rintelen behind the bars.

Chapter XXVII
Austria Infelix

I am young, I am not yet ready for supreme power.

— Prince Starhemberg

D r. KURT VON SCHUSCHNIGG, the Austrian Chancellor who
succeeded Dollfuss, and who since the Anschluss has been a Nazi
prisoner in the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, was born in 1897 in the
Lake Garda region of Italy, which was then Austrian territory. He
volunteered for war service when he was eighteen and was captured
in 1917 by Italian troops. The rest of the war he spent in an Italian
prison camp.

After Schuschnigg had been chancellor a short time two Viennese
met in Stephensplatz.

*T have a job,'’ said one.

^What? A job! Impossible," replied the other.

‘‘Yes, I sit in the bell-tower of St. Stephen's Church and wait for the
first joke about Schuschnigg to be born. Then I toll the bells."
“Hmmff. That's not much of a job. How much do you get?"

“Fifty groschen [ten cents] a day. But it's a job for life."

Dr. Schuschnigg, rather a dull personality indeed, was the son of a
general. His family belonged to the minor aristocracy, devoutly Catho-
lic, devoutly monarchist. He was educated in law at the University of
Innsbruck, and entered politics as a prot%e of the Christian social chan-
cellor, Monsignor Seipel. He became first minister of education, then
minister of justice, and finally Dollfuss' most reliable aide and confidant.

He had very little of Dollfuss' magnetic nimbleness; he was cold,
severe, logical, dutiful, dry. But absolutely honest and conscientious, he
was valuable as an offset to the erratic and unpredictable Starhemberg.
Schuschnigg had no demagoguery. But demagoguery was the last thing
Dollfuss wanted — except his own. He wanted a man who knew his busi-
ness, who kept his mouth shut, and whom he could trust implicitly.

It was Schuschnigg's ambition to be, not a politician, but a professor
« — a scholar in the history of law. But events seized him. As an attempt

413

INSIDE EUROPE

414

to wean the youth of the Tyrol from Hitlerism and turn it to patriotic
Austrian nationalism, he founded his militant Catholic youth organiza-
tion, the Sturmscharen. As we have seen, Dollfuss promptly utilized the
Sturmscharen as an offset to Starhemberg’s Heimwehr, when the Heim-
wehr momentarily became too powerful.

Dr. Schuschmgg began to show his quality in a struggle with the
Heimwehr in 1936. For a long time it was supposed that Prince Star-
hemberg, the vice-chancellor and Heimwehr leader, was the real force
behind the Austrian government ; Schuschpigg was thought — ^by the ill-
informed — ^to be no more than his ‘"front."' But gradually Schuschnigg
maneuvered the young Prince into a difficult position and finally got
rid of him.

The immediate reason for Starhemberg's dismissal was, it is said, a
hotheaded and somewhat indiscreet telegram he sent to Mussolini con-
gratulating him on the downfall of Ethiopia. "T congratulate you,"
Starhemberg wired, “on the famous and magnificent . . . victory of the
Fascist spirit over democratic dishonesty and hypocrisy." This was too
much for Schuschnigg, who was trying at the time to make his regime
appear as democratic as possible. The underlying reason for the split
was Schuschnigg's intention to make some sort of accord with Germany.
This Starhemberg, who was on the Italian side, would not countenance.

Schuschnigg knew that Starhemberg was famous for his delight in
pretty girls and fashionable female company. As if in ironic acceptance
of this, the dry semi-dictator — rafter throwing Starhemberg out — ^made
him honorary president of the Austrian Mothers" Aid Society.

Methodically Schuschnigg went on to clean up the Heimwehr. He
reconstructed the cabinet in November, eliminating Heimwehr mem-
bers; again in March, 1937, he whittled his government down, con-
centrating authority to himself and his own friends. Finally the Heim-
wehr was dissolved as an independent armed force and incorporated
into the government militia.

But then — a year later — ^the Nazis took Austria. And to Schusch-
nigg came a fate almost worse than that of Dollfuss.

Prince Out of Politics

Prince Starhemberg, born in 1899, owed much of his career to his
family, especially his mother. A direct descendant of one of the twelve
original families of the Holy Roman Empire, he is a lineal scion of
Ottakar I, Count of Steyr a thousand years ago. The name, corrupted

AUSTRIA INFELIX 415

from Storchenberg, means ‘‘Stork’s Mount.” One of his great-great-
grandfathers saved Vienna from the Turks in 1683. A smffish and
superior group, the Starhembergs are apt to consider mere Habsburgs
as distinctly parvenu. His mother. Countess Franziska Starhemberg,
a profound influence on his life, was a considerable force in the inner
workings of the Christian Social party.

Young Ernst Rudiger joined the Austrian army at seventeen. After
the war he became a soldier of fortune, a freebooter, fighting with the
Bavarian Oberland organization in frontier squabbles in Silesia. He met
Hitler, joined him, and took part in the Munich beer-hall Putsch. His
mother, horrified that her blue-blooded son should come too much under
Hitler’s Lumpen-Proletariat and anti-Catholic influence, brought him
back to Austria. She intervened with Monsignor Seipel to keep an eye
on her boy, start him on a “respectable” political career.

Young Starhemberg decided to found a private army of his own. He
owned fourteen castles throughout Austria. In one of them, Waxenberg,
he organized eight hundred of his retainers^ — ^practically serfs — into the
Starhemberg jaeger (hunter) detachment. This group merged with the
Heimwehr. For some years Starhemberg financed the movement him-
self. His fortune disappeared; he borrowed money right and left. At
one time his liabilities were about $600,000. When he was on the verge
of bankruptcy some rich industrialist friends — ^and Mussolini — rescued
him.

Opinions differed about Starhemberg’s ability in the days of his power.
Myself, I thought he was an exceptionally intelligent young man;
liberals, I feared, underestimated him just as they underestimated Doll-
fuss. I heard Starhemberg speak at Dollfuss’ funeral; he addressed
the dead leader with passionate thee-and-thou intimacy in one of the
most moving orations I ever heard. At lunch a few weeks later Star-
hemberg talked off-the-record to a group of newspapermen; his an-
swers were deliberate and a little long, but brilliantly phrased and
apposite.

Opinions did not differ about Starhemberg’s good looks. He was — ^and
is — ^an exceedingly handsome fellow. Nor did they differ about the basic
aims of his character and intelligence. He was a perfectly definite cleri-
cal reactionary. Also he was ambitious — ^if temperamental. One of his
dreams was to become Regent of Austria, like Horthy in Hungary.
Since the Anschluss he has been an exile in Switzerland and Paris —
perhaps waiting for his new day.

4i6

INSIDE EUROPE

Dictatorship on Crutches

After the Dollfuss murder the Austrian government proceeded like
a man with one foot on the street, one in the gutter; it wobbled, it
tottered, it managed to span unnatural extremes of distance — ^but it stood.
A dictatorship it was, and one of the most complete — if sloppy — ^in the
world. Hitler ‘'makes’' elections ; but at least he holds them ; Mussolini
is head of a political party which contributes some vitality to the state;
Stalin is part of an organism to which he admits responsibility. But in
Austria there was nothing but Schuschnigg, the Fatherland Front, and
the Almighty.

The combination ruled by police power and the support of Italy. It
evaded elections, because it feared that elections would let the Nazis in.
It assaulted the rights of citizens in a fantastic manner. In the year
1934, for instance, 106,000 dwellings in Vienna alone were raided by the
police. No fewer than 38,141 persons were arrested, of whom 19,090
were Nazis, 12,276 social democrats, and 6,775 communists. But — ^and
it was an important “but” — ^the terror never reached anything like the
repressive force of the Nazi terror. Most of those arrested promptly
got out of jail again. Even at its most extreme phase, it was difficult to
take the Schuschnigg dictatorship completely seriously, although Schutz-
bunders tried in 1935 got mercilessly severe sentences. This was be-
cause of Austrian gentleness, Austrian genius for compromise, Austrian
love for cloudy legal abstractions, and Austrian Schlamperei.

The social democrats, smarting from the February wounds, and the
communists, forgetting their usual propaganda which was restricted ex-
clusively to those who were already communists, formed, early in 193S,
a United Front. A new Schutzbund arose from the ashes of the old ; the
social democrats, taught a lesson in realism, changed their name to “The
Revolutionary Socialists of Austria.” They assaulted the country — ^with
literature. The dissemination of illicit propaganda in Austria, although
severely punishable, reached a point where scarcely a day passed without
a shower of leaflets or handbills somewhere in Vienna. Miniature news-
papers were passed around from hand to hand; some thirty thousand
copies of the newborn miniature Arbeiter Zeitung crossed the frontier
secretly every fortnight. In my mail-box I would find luscious specimens
daily of almost every kind of subversive literature. The government did
its best to check the flow. But it was like trying to mop up the Danube
with a sponge.

AUSTRIA INFELIX

417

Agreement with Germany

In July, 1936, Schuschnigg and Franz von Papen, the German minis-
ter to Austria, came to an agreement normalizing the relations between
the two countries. The event was hailed by Dr. Goebbels as a masterpiece
of the new German diplomacy; the Austrians, on their side, seemed
reasonably satisfied. Germany agreed to recognize the sovereignty of
Austria ; Austria agreed to release Nazi political prisoners and allow the
Nazis, as individuals, to join, the Fatherland Front. The long period of
tension between Austria and Germany was, it was announced, ended.

Papen's tactics had, it was proved, been very sensible. He had seen that
the iron fist would fail and so he tried the suede glove. His plan was to
take prominent Austrians aside, whisper to them that he himself found
distasteful things — indeed! — ^in the Nazi regime, and try to persuade
them that both should work together for good old pan-German ideals.
Papen worked very slowly — and confidently. His policy was based on
the fact that there is no use ravishing a girl whom you are to marry next
week. But his campaign was made difficult by two things. First, he was
not trusted. Second, as Frances Gunther put it, no Austrian could be
a Nazi twenty-four hours a day. It took too much energy.

Nevertheless, Schuschnigg had to come to some sort of modus vivendi
with Germany. The German boycott was killing Austria. For a time
Mussolini prevented any compromise, because the Duce was still boiling
with rage at the death of Dollfuss — Frau Dollfuss was a guest in his
house at Riccione, it will be remembered, when the murder took place.
But apparently in the summer of 1936 Schuschnigg told Mussolini that
he could not hold out much longer, and that some sort of Austro-German
pact was essential, no matter on what terms. Thus the gate was opened.

The Austrians were, after all, not Italians; they were of German stock
and eighty per cent of them were gro-Anschluss before Hitler, The oft-
labored scheme of a Danube confederation as a solution of the Austrian
problem cannot work while nationality remains a spiritual as well as
economic barrier between the Central European countries. Austria’s fate
was indissolubly connected with that of Germany; the only eventual
path of Austria was in the German orbit. And it seemed possible that
Austria, long an obstacle separating the two Fascist states, might become
a bridge connecting them.^

^For the last days of Austria— Hitler^s final attack, the incorporation of the
Austrian state into the Reich, and the Italian reaction— see Chapter VIII above,
The Fascist Offensive*

Chapter XXVIII

Hungary and
Dr. Habsburg

I believe in God, I believe in the unity of my country,
I believe in eternal divine justice,

I believe in the resurrection of Hungary.

Amen! — ^Hungarian National Creed

HEHIND Otto Habsburg are some seven hundred years of madness,
murder, melancholia. At least five of his cousins and forebears, in the
last couple of generations, have met violent deaths, and several died in-
sane. Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself at Mayerling in the greatest of
modern royal mysteries, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand was killed at
Sarajevo.

Archduke Franz-Josef-Otto-Robert-Marie-Antoine-Karl-Maximilian-
Heinrich - Sixtus - Xavier - Felix - Renatus-Ludwig-Gaetan-Pius-Ignaz,
Prince of Habsburg-Lorraine, the exiled pretender to the Austrian and
Hungarian thrones, comes of fertile blood. He is one of eight children
of the late Emperor, Karl, and his widow, Zita of Bourbon-Parme, who
was herself the tenth child of a litter of seventeen. Royalty produces at
least an insurance of complex continuity. Otto was born near Vienna —
in a chalet that is now a pension — on November 20, 1912.

The Habsburgs are more than a family, they are a sort of organism —
a resplendent fungus long attached to the body politic of Europe. They
are as prolific as white mice and as international as counterfeiters. The
Archduke Franz Ferdinand had 2,047 ancestors, including 1,486 Ger-
mans, 124 Frenchmen, 196 Italians, 89 Spaniards, 20 Englishmen, 52
Poles, and 47 Danes. The Habsburgs ruled in Europe for some sixteen
generations. Their polyglot and bulbous holdings included at one time
or other twenty countries, but never, one might say, a single country.
The family was always superior to the state. Family laws in old Austro-
Hungary had precedence over state laws, and the provisions of the
Family Charter, drawn up in 1839, are still unpublished and secret.

418

HUNGARY AND DR. HABSBURG

419

When he heard of Franz Ferdinand’s death in 1914 (which removed
the possibility of uncertainty in the succession), old Franz Josef, who
had been emperor for sixty-six years, exclaimed, “Ah! A higher power
has restored the order that I was unhappily unable to maintain.”

The Habsburg power toppled at the end of the war in 1918, but not
the Habsburg d3masty. When the last Emperor, Karl, a weak man, was
asked to abdicate, the Empress replied fiercely: “Rather will I die with
you here. Then Otto will come, and when all our own family has gone
there will still be Habsburgs enough.” Karl, indeed, never abdicated,
although he renounced all participation in the governments of Austria
and Hungary. He and Zita fled to exile. Twice Karl made abortive
Putsches in Hungary, in March, 1921, and October, 1921 ; the Hungarian
government of Admiral Horthy beat him. He died in Madeira in 1922.
Ever since Zita has trained her eldest son, Prince Otto, for kingship.

Otto grew up grave, intelligent, sensitive, and extraordinarily good-
looking. Through some pleasant chance he missed the traditional pouched
eyes of the Habsburgs, the pendulous under-lip. “Let that boy loose in
Austria and give people a chance to look at him and he’ll capture the
country like a Valentino,” a friend of mine said after a recent visit to
Stenockerzeel, the ramshackle castle in Bel^um where after vicissitudes
all over Europe the royal family now lives.

Otto is a modest boy and extremely well-mannered, but seven hundred
years of Habsburgs have driven into his brain complete appreciation of
the privileges and prerogatives of kingship. Already, in his occasional
public pronouncements, he refers to Austrians as “My People.” An
English friend asked Otto — ^before Anschluss — ^what he thought of
Hitler, and the prince regally replied, “Unfortunately not having had an
opportunity as yet to receive Mr. Hitler, I cannot say.”

The young prince has had to pay for his choice and dangerous lineage
by performing the inevitable chore of royalty, learning languages; he
speaks German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, and Hungarian quite
fluently. Zita had never been able to learn Hungarian, a staggeringly
difficult tongue; the chauvinist Hungarians never forgave her for this
and she saw to it that her son did not make the same mistake. He was
brought up, of course, a Roman Catholic, and he prays thrice daily.

After years of tutoring Otto went to the University of Louvain,
graduating with a Ph.D. degree in the spring of 1935. He is, I imagine,
the first royal pretender in history with a legitimate doctorate. His oral
examinations included questions on the closer economic cooperation of

INSIDE EUROPE

420

the Danube states, the reconcilability of the corporative Austrian consti-
tution with democratic development, and the reafforestation of parts of
the Hungarian plain. The written thesis, which ran to three hundred and
sixty-eight pages in its French text, concerned ^'the right, born of usage
and of the peasant law of inheritance, of the indivisibility of rural land
ownership in Austria.” He wrote it first in German and then translated
it into French. The published brochure was signed ‘'Dr. Otto von
Habsburg.”

He traveled a good deal in his early years, visiting Scandinavia,
Germany, Italy. Each trip done, he returned dutifully to Stenockerzeel,
his books, and Mother Zita. So far the old Empress has not found him a
bride. A good match would be with Princess Maria, the youngest daugh-
ter of the King and Queen of Italy. But Mussolini, contrary to general
opinion, does not like the idea of a Habsburg restoration — ^which would
tend to recreate an empire on his Adriatic flank — ^and largely for this
political reason the engagement didn’t occur.

Otto was popular in Austria ; of that no doubt. His mother Zita was
not so popular. It is a private idea of mine that restoration would have
been a good deal more possible if Otto’s return would not have meant the
return also of his mother — ^to say nothing of hundreds of assorted and
impoverished Habsburg cousins and aunts, who would have flocked to
Vienna like ants to a keg of syrup. The ex-Empress, a woman of
enormous strength of character and some old-fashioned ideas, is a good
mother, so good a mother that she might have found it difficult to let
Otto be king alone. And many Austrians had no fancy to see Otto
swaddled to the throne with Zita’s apron strings.

The only excuse for kingship in the modern world is the symbol it
provides of permanence. It gives a country an anchor into the dark
furrows of the future. Otto, if Austria or Hungary had taken him back,
might have given them the security of a fixed headship of the state and a
fixed succession. It is unfortunate that to make such provision for the
future one must dredge so deep into the shadows of the past. A restora-
tion seems a very backward gesture. “We did not wage the war,” Dr.
Benes once said, “in order to go back to former times.”

Otto's chances in Austria, even though the Schuschnigg-Starhem-
berg regime canceled the Habsburg exclusion laws, of course auto-
matically disintegrated and disappeared when Hitler took the country.
Hitler and Habsburgs don’t mix. But the possibility that Otto may
someday be king of Hungary cannot be excluded. One obstacle — Czecho-

HUNGARY AND DR. HABSBURG

421

Slovakia — ^has disappeared ; another, the personal opposition of Admiral
Horthy, may some day wane.

Noblesse Obligef

The chief internal problem of Hungary, which has been an independ-
ent kingdom since A.D, 1001, is that of the land. The country is almost
exclusively a pool of wheat. Agrarian prices fell drastically after 1930;
the nation was terribly overborrowed, with the largest per capita foreign
debt in Europe. The urgencies of the resultant crisis were not improved
by the maldistribution of economic power in the country. The feudal
aristocracy rules the land almost absolutely. One-third of the total arable
land of Hungary is owned by 980 men.

Another sixth of the land — ^these figures remind one of Spain — ^is
owned by some 1,112 magnates of the landed gentry class. Then come
about 250,000 small-holders who have up to 150 acres each. Following
are about 600,000 owners who are restricted to a plot so small that they
have to sell their labor power as agricultural workers elsewhere. Finally,
there are about 1,130,000 peasants quite without land — out of Hungary's
total population of roughly 8,600,000 — ^proportionately the largest group
of landless agrarian proletariat in the world.

The aristocrats, though many of them lost much power and wealth
by the amputation of Hungary after the war, are still a lush and fan-
tastic lot. The Esterhazys, the Karolyis, the Czekonitchs, the Hunyadis
and Telekis and Szaparys, maintain a shadow-glamour like nothing else
in Europe, now that similar remnants of colossal feudal power have dis-
appeared from Poland. Once an Esterhazy used a Titian painting as
lining for his cloak. A Karolyi once sent a precious bottle of tokay to a
sweetheart by special train.

These noblemen and their families intermarried to an almost incestu-
ous extent. The wife of Count Windischgraetz is a Szechenyi ; her hus-
band once went to jail for counterfeiting nationalist francs. Their
daughter married a son of the Karolyis. One Countess Karolyi is an
Apponyi. The wife of Michael Karolyi, president of the extremely
temporary Hungarian republic, was an Andrassy. Admiral Horthy's
daughter Paulette married a son of Count Emmerich Karolyi, relative of
Michael, and his son married a daughter of the same Karolyi, The
daughter of Count Julius Karolyi, who may be Horthy’s successor as
Regent — ^if he has a successor — ^married one of the Esterhazys.

These noblemen, practically without exception, favor the return of

INSIDE EUROPE

422

Otto to the throne. But Horthy and his later prime minister Goemboes
heartily opposed restoration. Their motives were not exclusively personal,
although Otto's return would lose Horthy his pleasant job; Zita would
never forgive him for having crushed the Karlist Putsches, Horthy and
Goemboes thought that a restoration would weaken Hungary, not
strengthen it; they felt that the house of Habsburg had brought more
harm to Hungary than good ; the choice, in their minds, was quite flat
between dynasticism and patriotism.

Hungary is not, as is usually said, a dictatorship; the Hungarian
parliament, founded in A.D. 1222, is one of the oldest in the world, and
theoretically, just as m England, it can overturn any prime minister by
an adverse vote. Horthy, the Regent, though reactionary as far as
social or economic ideas are concerned, is in effect the guardian of
constitutionalism and what vestigial democracy remains in the country,
because it is largely his influence that prevents any ambitious prime
minister from abolishing parliament and setting up dictatorial rule.

As long as Horthy and Count Julius Karolyi live, the squabbles of
domestic politics m Hungary do not mean much because the inside
leaders are all members of a secret society, heritage of the civil wars
and White Terror, called the ‘‘Double Cross," in reference to the Holy
Apostolic Cross of Hungary. It was founded by Horthy and his cohorts
when they organized a provisional government at Szeged in 1919 to
fight the communists then ruling in Budapest. Every Hungarian prime
minister since the counter-revolution has been a member of the Double
Cross. There are about thirty-five surviving Double-Crossers ; most of
them dine together informally every month in a beer-hall, the Matthias
Keller, near the Elizabeth bridge in Budapest. Bethlen and Karolyi
may quarrel, but their brotherhood in this secret organization outrides
personal feuds, and they combine against outsiders. The Double-Crossers
are mostly landed gentry and Protestants. The great legitimist aristo-
crats are not members.

Choleric Admiral

Nicholas Horthy de Nagybanya, born in 1868 of a Transylvanian
family, was for a generation a naval officer. Hardly brilliant, he never-
theless had qualities of candor and courage, and in thirty-six years of
service he rose without much influence of wealth or family to be, first,
naval aide-de-camp to the old Emperor Franz Josef, and second, admiral
commanding the Austro-Hungarian fleet. As such, he was partly respon-

HUNGARY AND DR. HABSBURG

423

sible for the merciless suppression of the mutiny which was recently
celebrated by the New York Theatre Union in Sailors of Cattaro.

The most unpleasant thing about Horthy is his White Terror history.
He was minister of war in the counter-revolutionary government that
followed the crash of the communist regime of Bela Kun. On August
10, I 9 i 9 > detachments were stationed at Siofok, in trans-Danubia.
Some officers, drunk and cheerful, talked bloodthirstily about Bol-
shevik atrocities. Horthy remarked: Words, always words! And never
any action !” So the officers, including men who later became infamous
as wholesale sadists, went out and that night murdered sixty Jews and
communists. This was the beginning of the White Terror. When mem-
bers of a British labor delegation investigating the atrocities complained
to Horthy that the officers responsible had not been punished, the ad-
miral replied in naive indignation, “Why, they are my best men

Horthy is one of the most indiscreet men in Europe. A bluff and
friendly fellow nowadays, he likes to see visiting notables and journalists,
but his aides try to isolate him on account of his enormous, full-blooded
disposition to air his views — ^frankly. What he says in private conversa-
tion about the Serbs and Czechs and Germans and anyone you mention
will make your hair dance and quiver. He is seventy, but aflame with
a sort of humorous-choleric vitality. He positively explodes with passion
and pathos. At one moment he may burst a collar discussing Hungarian
revisionism ; at the next, pick up a paper-knife and go through the ges-
tures of murder to illustrate a point ; at the next, mention with tears in
his eyes how good a human being old Franz Josef was, but how that
“poor boy’' — Otto— cannot hope to rule in his (Horthy’s) stead.

His many years of regency have mellowed him a good deal ; whatever
the defects of his character he has been a loyal and courageous patriot ;
when he dies it may be an evil day for Hungary.

Goemboes and His Successors

General Julius Goemboes de Jakfa was an adventurer, a nationalist,
a desperado politician, all his life. He was born in 1886 in a district
of Hungary populated mostly by Germans. The family came from the
Rhineland, and the name was originally Gelb. His father, who was a
school-teacher, Magyarized it to Goemboes some years before the future
prime minister was born. His mother never learned to speak correct
Hungarian. Goemboes died in October, 1936.

A rebellious Magyar chauvinist, he went to cadet school and then

INSIDE EUROPE

424

the war college in Vienna. He was almost expelled when a professor
asked him if he would be faithful to the Habsburg regime in the event
of a revolution. Goemboes answered vigorously No. He would, he said,
as a Magyar officer, fight for nationalist Hungary, not for the d3masty.
As with Hitler and Pilsudski, the dominant note in his character from
childhood was a fanatic nationalism.

Goemboes was wounded in the war on the Rumanian front and then
served on the staff in Vienna. A man of plot and counter-plot, highly
ambitious, he organized the ^'M.O.V.E.’’ (Magyar Orszagos Vedo
Egylet), a sort of officers' trade union; for Goemboes, like his idol
Mussolini, had a strong socialist streak. The Hungarian revolution
occurred and Goemboes offered to reorganize the socialist Michael
Karolyi's army. Karolyi, distrusting him, refused, and he fled to Vienna,
where — ^meeting in secret rendezvous in the house of a Jewish carpenter
— ^he and Count Stephen Bethlen, another emigre, plotted the downfall
of the Karolyi regime. When Bela Kun came to power, Goemboes
went to Szeged and joined Horthy in organizing the counter-revolu-
tionary forces, and his great days began.

Beyond doubt, much more than Horthy, he was responsible for the
White Terror in which at least several thousand innocent Jews and com-
munists were tortured and murdered. Beyond doubt, too, he was the
force behind Horthy repelling the two adventures of the Emperor Karl
to regain his throne. On March 21, 1921, it was he who intervened
between Horthy and Karl saying, ^‘Majesty, I order you to leave this
country eight o'clock to-night." On the occasion of the second Putsch,
in October of the same year, Goemboes, distrusting the regular army,
called out and armed the secret societies and students' corps.

The Hungary of that time was the worst dictatorship in Europe.
In it were Magyar traces of all the Fascist tendencies we know to-day:
violent economic nationalism, hatred of Jews, and vigorous suppression
of liberals, pacifists, socialists alike. Goemboes was indeed in active touch
with Hitler in 1922 and 1923, but he disavowed him after the Munidi
beer-hall Putsch. The murderers of the German foreign minister Rathenau
were hidden for some years on his estate at Nagy-Teteny, disguised as
gardeners.

Goemboes originally was a member of Bethlen's Union party, which
ruled Hungary for a decade. In 1923 he seceded to form a sort of Hun-
garian Fascist party, and stayed in the political wilderness for five years.
He rejoined Bethlen in 1928, and became minister of war. When the
complex and enigmatic Bethlen resigned in the middle of the Hungarian

HUNGARY AND DR. HABSBURG 425

financial crisis of I93^> after ten years as prime minister, Goemboes suc-
ceeded him. He was never Bethlen’s equal in cultivation or intelligence.

Goemboes attracted much attention in 1935 by attempting to broaden
Hungary’s sphere of foreign political action. From the time that Beth-
len had contrived the tie-up with Italy, Hungary had been IMussolini’s
puppet. Goemboes glanced northward to the Nazis. He was active, more-
over, in negotiating what promised then to become a Central European
bloc of dissatisfied states, Germany, Hungary, and Poland, and joined
one of General Goering’s famous hunting parties in East Prussia to
this end.

One successor to Goemboes as prime minister was the remarkable —
and unfortunate — Dr. Bela Imredy, one of Hungary’s leading economists.
He sponsored severe anti-Semitic legislation, partly as a result of Nazi
pressure; he was accused then of being partly Jewish himself by indig-
nant liberals and Jews. He denied this, and set out to prove it. But
research made it clear that he was, in fact, of remote Jewish descent.
There was nothing for Imredy to do but resign ; which he did. The little
story then went around that he had to eat standing up, because he
wouldn’t sit down with a Jew. Imredy is still a considerable power
behind the scenes. He represents the strongest Nazi influence in
Hungary.

His successor, appointed in February, 1939, was the veteran aristocrat
Count Paul Teleki, a moderate. Teleki is anti-Nazi (like his old friend
and sponsor Count Bethlen), but pro-German in general sympathy. He
was born in 1879, ^ geographer by profession, is one of the most

learned men in Central Europe. His foreign minister, who embraced an
extreme pro- Axis policy, but who was more pro-Italian than pro-German,
is Count Stephen Czaky. In the great crisis of 1939 Czaky desperately
rushed between Berchtesgaden, Salzburg, and Rome, seeking protection
from one partner, Italy, in case his country was attacked by the other,
Germany. Czaky was for years head of the news department of the
Hungarian foreign office. Like almost everyone who counts in Hungary,
he, too, was — ^and is — ^a Bethlen protege

Nem Nem Soha

In Hungary is the strongest, the most pervasive nationalism in all
Europe. In the chauvinism sweepstakes the Hungarians beat even the
Poles. A little story is relevant. The proud father of an eight-year-old

INSIDE EUROPE

426

schoolgirl entering a geography class bought her a globe. She surveyed
it and broke into tears. "Tapa,” she wailed, “I want a globe with only
Hungary on it.”

Hungarian nationalism has fed ever since 1919 on the open wounds
made by the peace treaties which, in their comparative iniquitousness,
reached in the Treaty of Trianon the most iniquitous point. Hungary
lost, after the war, no less than 68.5 per cent of its territory — 191,756
square kilometers out of a former total area of 282,870 square kilometers.
Hungary lost no less than 58.2 per cent of its population — 10,782,560
people out of 18,264,500. Hungary lost all its gold, silver, copper, salt,
and mercury ; it lost its best collieries, eighty-five per cent of its forests,
sixty-five per cent of its vineyards. It lost fifty-six per cent of its
horses, sixty-nine per cent of its cattle, fifty-two per cent of its fac-
tories, fifty-seven per cent of its arable land, and fifty-two per cent
of its total wheat production. Amputated from Hungary was its outlet
to the sea. The economic unity of the old Danube basin, an almost
perfectly balanced area, was destroyed.

On the other hand, one should point out that these terrible losses
included districts not populated by Hungarians. A full forty-five per
cent of the old population were minorities — Slovaks, Rumanians, Serbs,
Croats, Ruthenians, Italians, Slovenes. The ostensible justification of
the Trianon Treaty was liberation of these minorities. Of the 10,782,560
people lost, 6,345,500 were not Hungarians. But here is precisely where
the trouble lies. Had the victor powers been content to draw really
accurate minority and frontier lines, Hungarian revisionism would have
had little pretext. But some 3,000,000 people who were pure Magyars
were grabbed along with the others, and made to live, a new minority,
within the new borders of Rumania, Jugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.

The sole basis of Hungarian foreign policy since the war has been
revisionism — ^to change the treaties in order to get its lost territory back.
To frustrate Hungarian aims, the Little Entente — Czechoslovakia, Ru-
mania, Jugoslavia — ^was originally formed. What has happened to it we
shall explore in the chapters that follow.

After Munich, in 1938, the Hungarians — ^by grace of German help —
regained their lost Slovak territory. And in March, 1939, after the German
seizure of Bohemia-Moravia, the Hungarians — ^this time without German
help — reacquired their former territory in Ruthenia, and thus established
a common frontier with Poland. In September Poland disappeared. Now

HUNGARY AND DR. HABSBURG 427

Hungary has Soviet Russia on its new Ruthenian frontier, and probably
wishes it had not taken Ruthenia after all.

Hungarians still look longingly on the ‘‘unredeemed” minorities in
Jugoslavia and Rumania. But Germany, it seems, looks longingly — and
hungrily — ^at them.

Chapter XXIX
Masaryk and Benes

The master of Bohemia is the 'inaster of Europe,

— Bismarck

We shall always be a small minority in the world, hut, when
a small nation accomplishes something with its limited means,
what it achieves has an immense and exceptional value, like
the widovt/s mite, ,,, It is a deliberate and discerning love of
a nation that appeals to me, not the indiscriminate love that
assumes everything to be right because it bears a national label,
, , , Love of one^s own nation should not entail non-love of
other nations, . , . Institutions by themselves are not enough,

— Masaryk

M asaryk — ^ what grandeur the name connotes The son of a serf
who created a nation ; the blacksmith boy who grew to have "'the
finest intellect of the century” ; the pacifist who organized an army that
performed a feat unparalleled in military annals — ^the Czechoslovak
legions who marched across Siberia to the Pacific ; the philosopher who
became a statesman in spite of himself; the living father of a state who
is also its simplest citizen; an unchallengeably firm democrat who, in
the debacle of the modern world, still believes in rule by tolerance; the
man who more than any other smashed the old Austro-Hungarian em-
pire, so that Czechoslovakia, a free republic, rose from its ruins — ^the
stablest, strongest, and most prosperous of the succession states.

In his autobiography Masaryk says that his life has been “shot
through with paradox.” He is, for instance, the son of a coachman —
and he lives to-day in the castle of the old Bohemian kings. His father
was, moreover, a servant on an imperial estate, so that in throwing the
Habsburgs out of Czechoslovakia Masaryk also symbolically threw them
from the front yard where he grew up in the most crushing poverty.
He was, for instance, both a locksmith's apprentice and a helper in a

1 1 print this section on Masaryk exactly as I originally wrote it in 1935.

428

MASARYK AND BENES 429

blacksmith's shop, because in early youth he disliked school. During the
war he was a first-class practical conspirator, a specialist in decoys,
codes, and stratagems. Yet the whole basis of his career was moral-
intellectual. He was one of the most formidably learned men of his
time, a philosopher and prophet of almost Judaic stature.

The greatest of living Czechoslovaks, the first act in his life to bring
him prominence was an investigation which proved a set of documents
hallowed and revered by the Czech and Slovak peoples to be forgeries.
A Roman Catholic who turned Protestant, he gained early distinction by
defending a Jew wrongfully accused of an obscure ritual murder. He
exposed as fabrications of the Austrian foreign office the documents
in the Friedjung case, which ruined what was then his official career;
but this occasion made him a hero of the oppressed Slavic peoples.
Dominating his life have been two factors, faith in Czechoslovakia and
the pursuit of truth.

It was not idly that Masaryk called his philosophy "'Realism.” Once
he all but decided to return to Austria during the war so that he might
be hanged — ^lie knew that his martyrization would help the Czech national
cause. There were several attempts on his life which he shrugged off —
he was psychologically incapable of fear — ^but he took the precaution of
drawing up his own obituary so that it would be the best possible propa-
ganda for the liberation of his people.

He founded the most central of central European states in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, where he negotiated a Czech-Slovak unity pact, and in
Washington, D. C., where he issued the Czechoslovakian declaration of
independence. He was proclaimed president of Czechoslovakia after he
had not set foot in it for four years, and when he was 4500 miles away.

His autobiography is warm and rigid with insistence on the most
complete intellectual, moral, and emotional probity. He records how a
simple lie might have saved his life when he was in acute danger in
Moscow — ^to gain cover in a hotel he would have had to say incorrectly
that he was registered there ; he refused although the bullets were splat-
tering about him — ^and his life was saved an3rvvay. Yet in his career he
was a splendid opportunist.

In Washington, before attempting to make any appointment at the
White House, Masaryk spent weeks in a detailed and penetrating study
of Wilson's writings. The old professor was knee-deep in books about
and by Wilson. Then he drew up his manifesto on Czech aspirations
for independence and presented it to Wilson. Half a dozen times in the

430

INSIDE EUROPE

document Masaryk had cleverly used citations from Wilson's own works
as legal and political authority for the Czech claims.

Two quotations from his great book. The Making of a State, give
fleeting illustrations of his quality:

‘‘Hardly had I settled in Geneva when news of my son Herbert’s ill-
ness came unexpectedly from my family in Prague; and, on March
15 (19^5)? a telegram announcing his death. Thus, like thousands of
families at home, we were stricken. He was clean and honorable in rare
degree, a poet-painter whose ideal of beauty was simplicity. Healthy he
was, too, and strong through physical exercise. He had done all he could
to avoid fighting for Austria and yet found death through the War.
T3q)hus, caught from some Galician refugees whom he was helping,
killed him — z, case for fatalists ! My old Clerical opponents did not fail
to send me from Prague their coarse and malicious anonymous letters.
‘The finger of God!’ they said. To me it seemed rather an injunction
not to abate or to grow weary in my efforts.”

And discussing one of his visits to Tolstoy,

“Neither morally nor, I think, psychologically, did Tolstoy recognize
the distinction between aggressive violence and self-defense. Here he was
wrong; for the motives are different in the two cases and it is the motive
which is ethically decisive. Two men may shoot, but it makes differ-
ence whether they shoot in attack or defense. The mechanical acts are
identical but the two acts are dissimilar in intention, in object, in moral-
ity. Tolstoy once argued arithmetically that fewer people would be killed
if attack were not resisted ; that, in fighting, both sides get wilder and
more are killed ; whereas if the aggressor meets with no opposition he
ceases to slay. But the practical standpoint is that, if anybody is to be
killed, let it be the aggressor. Why should a peace-loving man, void of
evil intent, be slain and not the man of evil purpose who kills? . . .
I know, too, that it is hard sometimes to say precisely who the aggressor
is; yet it is not impossible. Thoughtful men of honest mind can dis-
tinguish impartially the quarter whence attack proceeds.”

Thomas Garrigue Masaryk was born on March 7, 1850, in the Mora-
vian town of Hodonin. His mother, a cook, seems to have been a re-
markable woman; Masaryk pays touching tribute to her strength, her
ideals, her clamor to give her son an education. Apparently he had little
sympathy with his father. He went to school in Vienna, became a pro-
fessor at Prague, wrote exhaustively (of some psychological interest is
the fact that his first book was on suicide), entered politics. His wife was
an American woman, Miss Charlotte Garrigue, whom he met in student
days at Leipzig and whose name he added to his own. He writes of her :
*‘She was beautiful to look at ; she had a magnificent intellect, better than

MASARYK AND BENES 431

mine.”^ Their son, Jan, a turbulent and candid character, became Czecho-
slovak minister in London.

Masaryk's real career did not begin until he was well over sixty. He
records a testimonial dinner given him at the time, a sort of climax to
his work as a distinguished savant; he tells wryly of his inner feeling
that he was being buried before he was dead. Then came the high years,
between sixty-five and seventy, when he fled from Prague to organize
the Czech movement abroad. His final work, nurture of the new Czecho-
slovak state, began at an age when the lives as well as careers of most
men are long since over.

He is a very old man now, but still alert, and the range of his interests
is extraordinary. His conversation is a bit diffuse ; he is inclined to get
lost in the flow of his own sentences. In one half-hour*s talk I had with
him he mentioned, aside from domestic politics, such things as birth con-
trol, Irish nationalism and the Catholic Church, Senator Borah, biology,
modern American literature (of which he has an amazing knowledge),
the Polish corridor, the amount of pocket money of American soldiers
in France, the Habsburgs, Dostoevsky (he is, at eighty-five, just finish-
ing a book on Dostoevsky), Bill Hard, the world economic crisis, the
Jugoslav sculptor Mestrovic, and a new English novel he had just been
reading and the title of which he couldn’t for the life of him remember.

1 had expected to meet a man excessively stem, even self-righteous.
But Masaryk has a strong sense of humor. He cackled vigorously. His
interest in human nature, immense, neglects no comic facet. He told
Capek that academic psychology was of no help to him in learning about
human nature — '‘only life and novels.” For seventy years, he said, he
has been reading novels every day. "Man is a damned complicated and
puzzling machine. And each man different.” During the whole period of
the war, he has related, he slept only half a dozen nights ; presumably he
read novels instead.

After seeing him I made a few rough notes as follows : "Warm, strong
handshake ; no glasses ; old man’s eyes, hard to tell the color of them,
probably deep gray; still a fuzz of white hair on the scalp; all his own
teeth, plus a bit of gold shining when he laughs; plenty of mustache,
small beard; glazed, hard, shiny cheeks; prominent nose; a typical
peasants face; distinctly not patrician or 'intellectual’; a bowlder,
shrunken, hard-bitten, out of the soil.”

Masaryk is old. But his work is done. He has built a nation. The story,

2 Capek, President Masaryk Tells His Story, p. 121.

INSIDE EUROPE

432

in its perfection of sequence in cause and effect, is like a Greek tragedy —
except that it ended happily. He will die soon. There is no man of our
time who will leave a better memory, for others to remember.®

Benes

'T can tell you that without Benes we should not have had our revolu-
tion,'" Masaryk told Capek. The two men worked together from the time
of the war, though Benes was thirty-five years younger. The old philos-
opher roamed the world, seeking sympathy for the Czech cause ; Benes,
likwise a refugee, stayed in Paris — ^he was the organizer, the filing clerk,
the skillful and adhesive practical politician. Masaryk wrote Czech aspira-
tions amid the stars; the pertinacious Benes wrote them into treaties
which redrew the map of Europe.

Dr. Eduard Benes, sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, an intelligent and re-
sponsible world statesman, one of the soundest of European public men,
was uninterruptedly Czechoslovak minister of foreign affairs from 1919
until December of 1935 ; thus he was the doyen of the foreign ministers
of Europe. He is the son of a peasant, and was born in 1884 in Kozlany,
Bohemia. As poor a boy as Masaryk, like his master he was self-educated ;
but whereas Masaryk’s Ph.D. thesis was on suicide, that of Benes in 1908
was on a more practical issue, ^The Austrian Problem and the Czecho-
slovak Question.^’

Benes is as efficient as a dynamo. I have never seen him laugh. He is
small and slight. He wears a flat-brimmed hat cocked high on the head.
He works about fifteen hours a day, and like Mussolini (whom he doesn’t
otherwise resemble) he delights to see people if they can tell him things ;
he is one of the most accessible statesmen in Europe. He has no cant or
side. He talks facts. Listening to you, he forms your ideas into an orderly
progression. One — ^Two — ^Three — ^and then discusses them in series Ex-
pressing his own viewpoint he again uses numerals, but with alphabetical
subheads i A, 2B, and so on. He is a wiry negotiator, but the basis of his
success is method. No one ever put anything over on Eduard Benes.

It gives one a queer oblique glimpse through the years to remember
that Benes was not always Benes. His names, at one time or other,
have been “Spolny,” "‘Belsky,” “Berger,” “Novotny,” “Konog,” “Sicha,”
and “Leblanc.” Fifteen years ago the Czechoslovak foreign minister
was busy, like Masaryk, forging passports, crawling across frontiers,

^ Thomas Garrigue Masaryk died at the age of 87 in September, 1037. His coun-
trymen united as one man to mourn him.

MASARYK AND BENES

433

in momentary danger of being shot as a spy — ^\\’hich he was. Once he
was arrested in England for traveling with a false passport. Within
six months he was officially signing passports of the nation he helped
to create.

Like Masaryk, Benes has tried to be a good European. He performed
the complex miracle of adjusting complete national patriotism to a deep
and conscientious regard to his duties, as he saw them, to Europe as a
whole. He helped to found the League of Nations, and for years he
helped to run it. One of the greatest living authorities on security and
disarmament, he was almost as’ active in Geneva for a long time as in
Prague. Whenever an important European issue arose, Benes wrote
an “expose,” usually a pamphlet eighty or ninety pages long, which he
read to the Czech parliament ; and it was always a complete and authorita-
tive statement of the problem. Benes was president of the Sanctions As-
sembly in September, 1935. His dearest ambition was to organize an
effective United States of Europe.

When Masaryk retired in December, 1935, Benes, as was expected,
succeeded him to the presidency of Czechoslovakia.

I have already described the harrowing crisis Benes went through at
Munich, when his country was destroyed. He behaved like a good Euro-
pean to the end. After Munich, he fled to London, and subsequently
accepted a teaching appointment in the United States, at the University
of Chicago.

Then war came again in 1939. Dr, Benes scurried back to London,
and once more, after twenty weary years, began exactly the same sort of
work for the resurrection of his country he had performed in 1919*

Czech Complex

The good wife is the one you don't hear about. So it is with countries.
Almost everyone who visited Czechoslovakia in the old days returned
to quote the old saying, ‘‘Happy is the country that has no history.”
Czechoslovakia had, of course, plenty of history, but it was certainly
true that local Czech politics, under the inspiration of Masaryk, pursued
a very smooth and inconspicuous course. Tragically ironic this seems
now!

One of the first persons I met on the first of many visits to Prague
was the dramatist Karel Capek, author of the robot play RV.R* He said
at once: “Why do you come here? We have no Hitlers, no royal pre-
tenders, no Putsches, no communist riots, no palace scandals. T warn you

INSIDE EUROPE

434

immediately — ^we are terribly uninteresting/* And the dour Czechs were,
indeed, a great contrast to the flamboyance of Hungary, the paralysis of
Vienna, the hysterics of Berlin.

I met a press officer in the foreign office — ^then one of the best press
offices in Europe, incidentally. Czechoslovakia having been a civilized
country, there was no need for a newspaperman to waste his first three
days convincing the authorities that he was not a burglar or spy. The
press bureau in Prague was so well run that it was often accused of
''propaganda.** Of course, propaganda was what it existed for. What
enemies of Czechoslovakia objected to was that Czechoslovak propaganda
was so friendly, efficient, and, in general, honest and accurate that rival
countries were outrun.

Czechoslovakia was, of course, more fortunate to begin with than its
partners or opponents. Its people were, for one thing, a closely-knit cul-
tural unit, deriving from the tradition of Bohemian kings older than
Habsburgs or Hohenzollems. The Czechs were steadier than their vola-
tile southern Slav cousins, more industrious than the Poles and Ruma-
nians, and with a better background of administrative experience — ^the
Czechs were the civil servants of the old empire — ^than Slovenes or Serbs.

They inherited, moreover, about three-quarters of the industry of the
old empire and most of its mineral and other resources. Thus the great
streams of toys, ceramics, glassware, textiles, steelware, munitions, beer,
paper, yarn, hams, buttons, that poured from Czechoslovakia in the post-
war days. Again, Czechoslovakia, unlike Jugoslavia or Poland, had
been untouched by actual battle ; physical reparation was not a problem.
Finally, Czechoslovakia had a solid and unbeaten army, comprised of the
Russian legions, in contrast to the wrecked fugitives that had to restore
order in the other succession states.

On this lucky basis the young country, wedged like a downward-pointv
ing long-nosed dachshund in the very center of Europe, built, and built
well. It eschewed foreign loans and foreign short-time credits, and so
was not caught frenziedly short like Germany and the other Danubian
countries in the 1931 financial crisis; it strictly limited imports ("Any
Czech citizen who buys an orange,*' said the first finance minister, "is
a traitor to the state’*) in an effort to maintain its favorable trade bal-
ance ; it kept its budget in good order ; it made a fairly successful land
reform ; it built schools for free education ; it permitted inner politics to
evolve on a very wide coalition basis including the social democrats ; and
it adopted a fairly reasonable policy toward its numerous minorities.

MASARYK AND BENES 435

Even so, after a decade of almost uninterruptedly calm development,
Czechoslovakia in the middle ’thirties began to encounter serious troubles.
Two events of great importance occurred. One was the sudden and power-
ful rise of a disguised Nazi party under the former gymnasium in-
structor Konrad Henlein. In the 1935 elections this party, representing
the bulk of Czechoslovakia’s minority of 3,300,000 Germans, polled
1,247,000 votes and became overnight die second largest party in the
country, rising from zero seats in the chamber to forty-four. Henlein
protested loyalty to Masaryk and the Czechoslovak state— at first.

Intelligent Dr. Benes recognized the Nazi danger. Therefore the second
event. He went through Europe mending fences with assiduous alacrity.
The first plank in his policy was the alliance with France, the second the
presumptive solidarity of the Little Entente — Czechoslovakia, Rumania,
Jugoslavia. But as the German menace mounted and Czech relations with
Poland grew steadily worse Dr. Benes saw that he needed something
else, and so he went to Moscow and signed a mutual assistance pact — ^not
merely a “non-aggression” pact which is the form such treaties usually
take — ^with the U.S.S.R. Czechoslovakia became the military link between
France and the Soviet Union as defense against Germany and the other
revisionist states.

But neither Benes nor anyone else counted on the savage efficiency of
Hitler, and the weakness of the democracies.

Dr. Hodza and Other Leaders

Dr. Milan Hodza, a Slovak agrarian, became prime minister after the
elevation of Dr. Benes to the presidency. His appointment was shrewd
politics, a gesture of the large Slovak component of the republic. Am-
bitious and hard-boiled, Hodza took office after many years of opposi-
tion and started off well. He was born in Sucany (then a town in Hun-
gary) in 1878, a protestant. He took his Ph.D. at the University of
Vienna, became a journalist, and sat in the old Hungarian parliament as
a representative of the Slovak minority.

After Munich, in November, 1938, Dr. Emil Hacha became president
of what was left of the Czechoslovak republic, as we have seen. The un-
fortunate Hacha, a Nazi puppet— nothing more, nothing less— was a
distinguished lawyer, who had been chief justice of the Czechoslovak
Supreme Court, and also a Justice in the World Court at the Hague. He
is 66, and a devout Catholic. He once— of all things !— translated Kip-

INSIDE EUROPE

436

ling^s jungle books into Czech. Hacha’s first ''prime minister” was
Rudolf Reran, an anti-Benes man and a reactionary agrarian.

More interesting as a human being — and of a good deal more potential
importance — ^than Hacha or Reran is the Slovak priest, Dr. Joseph Tiso,
who became first president of the Slovak "republic” in October, 1939.
Tiso, as we know, was the man who opened the way to Hitler’s seizure of
Bohemia and Moravia in March. Theoretically his Slovakia is “inde-
pendent,” while Bohemia-Moravia, under Hacha, became merely a “pro-
tectorate.” Tiso is of course completely under the German thumL Behind
him is a well-known Slovak secessionist, by name Bela Tuka.

Danube Pact

It is in the Danube region that those two doughty warriors, politics
and economics, fight some of their grimmest battles. Nothing, on the
face of it, would seem to be more sensible a solution of the difficulties
of the area than an economic recreation of empire unity. Abolish the
tariifs that deface the territory; cut out mushroom nationalist indus-
tries; exchange agrarian goods for industrial products on a basis of
efficiency. Simple? Far from it! The Danube countries far preferred
to sink alone than swim together. The nationalist hatreds of these regions
cannot be expressed in graphs and charts. They defy belief. I remember
a young Hungarian’s response to a proposal for a mutual ten-per-cent
cut on Czech-Hungarian tariffs.

“What!” he exclaimed. “Do you imagine we rate our hatred of
the Czechs at only ten per cent !’^

The pre-Munich political cleavage of the Danube powers did not, of
course, correspond to the natural economic realities of the region. The
six states were stratified into two groups : the winners, Czechoslovakia,
Rumania, Jugoslavia, against the losers, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria. This
political groupment was bad business, as business. Economically, Czecho-
slovakia and Austria should have formed one bloc, an industrial bloc,
vis-a-vis an agrarian bloc of the predominantly grain-producing coun-
tries, Hungary, Rumania, Jugoslavia, Bulgaria. All attempts at Danube
salvage broke on this issue, the fundamental and inescapable dichotomy
between the political and economic interests of the region.

There were other political difficulties. Austra-Czechoslovakia (if it
had existed) would not have been a big enough market for the grain of
Hungaro-Rumano-Bulgoslavia. Germany, the best natural purchaser,
would have had to join the industrial brethren. Then politics protruded

MASARYK AND BENES

437

its ugly face again : because France objected to this. So did Italy. The
Little Entente itself was far from being a happy economic unit. Czecho-
slovakia bought comparatively little grain from its allies Rumania and
Jugoslavia, because the strong Czech agrarian party, defending its inter-
nal interests, demanded high tariffs on grain from the Entente partners.

Balkans

“The war between Hungary and Jugoslavia has been averted, and the League
of Nations will try to find a way to settle the controversy. Perhaps the best solution
would be to plow under every third Balkan.”

— Howard Brubaker.

Beyond and below what was once Czechoslovakia lie the deep Balkans.
They are, it has been said, a sort of hell paved with the bad intentions
of the powers. The great war was fought, remarked the Greek statesman
Venizelos, to Europeanize the Balkans; what the war of 1914 did,
more or less, was Balkanize Europe. The Balkan peninsula is an un-
stable pyramid of nationalist hatreds, and of minority hatreds within
nations.

One can make a pretty list of them. What is the worst hatred in
Southern and Eastern Europe? Does a Bulgar hate a Serb more than a
Croat hates a Serb? Do the hatreds of both combined equal the hatred
of either for, say, an Italian or a Greek? Does a Hungarian hate a
Rumanian more than a Rumanian hates a Bulgarian? Does a Galician
hate a Pole more than a Ukrainian hates a Russian?

It is an intolerable affront to human and political nature that these
wretched and unhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and
do, have quarrels that cause world wars. Some hundred and fifty thou-
sand young Americans died because of an event in 1914 in a mud-caked
primitive village, Sarajevo. Loathsome and almost obscene snarls in
Balkan politics, hardly intelligible to a Western reader, are still vital
to the peace of Europe, and perhaps the world.

Chepter XXX

Carol, Lupescu, and Rumania

R umania, a rich country, with 18,800,000 people, is ruled by King
Carol, who in turn is ruled by Magda Lupescu. The land swims in
oil, smothers in grain and timber, though much wealth has been lost by
the depredations of corrupt politicians. The capital, Bucharest, is a tin-
selly sort of little Paris where the main street, the Calea Victoria, flutters
with silken skirts and the leather trappings of gay carriages transporting
perfumed, corseted officers. Here wealth produced by the sweating and
starving peasants is spent on tsuica (plum spirit), on caviare from
Danube sturgeons, on huge red strawberries from the Transylvanian
hills.

For three generations Rumania was ruled by a family of hereditary
semi-dictators, the Bratianus; it was a Bratianu who peddled the Ru-
manian crown around the courts of Europe and brought back Carol's
granduncle as the country’s first king. The policy of the Bratianus was
that of the Turk suzerains and Phanariot Greek concessionaires who
had preceded them — despoil the land with artful greed. No country in
Europe has been so corruptly manipulated and exploited. Baksheesh was
the national watchword. After the war came a land reform. The peas-
ants, to buy seed and tools, borrowed money at interest rates of thirty,
forty, even fifty per cent. But they could not sell the glut of grain the
land produced. As a result agrarian bankruptcy ruined them in thou-
sands and the agricultural debt became, per capita, the highest in the
world. The finances were paralyzed, the budget deficit mounted out of
sight — ^and in the ornate streets of Bucharest money flowed like silk in
the hands of a corrupt and chosen few.

There is a cruel little joke about Rumania. ‘'Mania” means madness.
“Kleptomania” means madness to steal. “Rumania” means madness to
steal applied to a nation.

Rumanians are good-natured and fatalistic folk, colorful and easy-
going; they don’t like trouble or bloodshed. They are not like Serbs,
who have high qualities of heroism and a predisposition to patriotic mur-
der. There has never been a revolution in Rumania. The Rumanians are
oddly mixed in blood, being originally Latin, the descendants of Roman

438

CAROL, LUPESCU, AND RUMANIA 439

legions sent to the province of Dacia by the emperor Trajan; atop this
were superimposed centuries of Slavic blood. And there are traces of
Gipsy, Tartar, Greek, and Turk in most Rumanians.

To this country and its primitive and illiterate people came a young
British princess about forty years ago. She was Marie, daughter of the
Duke of Edinburgh and granddaughter of both Queen A’’ictoria of Eng-
land and the Tsar of Russia, representing a unique concentration of
royalty rare in the modern world. Marie married Ferdinand, the Ru-
manian heir apparent, and gave birth to six children, the eldest of whom
was Carol. She and Ferdinand ruled from 1914 till Ferdinand died in
1927. Meanwhile all manner of scandalous things had happened. And
kept on happening.

Carol was a complicated, truculent, and strong-willed youngster. Even
as a boy he was hard to manage. He disliked his father, the arid, flinty
Ferdinand, and adored his mother — ^at the beginning. He bitterly re-
sented, however, the power in the court of one of the great Rumanian
nobles. Prince Stirbey, and of Jon Bratianu, the dictator, who was
Stirbey’s brother-in-law. Carol grew up to follow the example of the
court, and began to lead an emotional life of considerable complexity
himself.

In 1918 he met Mile. Zizi Lambrino in Jassy, the provincial town
where the Rumanian court had taken refuge during the German inva-
sion. Marie tried to frustrate his affair with Lambrino, with the result,
of course, that she strengthened it. As if going out of his way to annoy
his family, Carol actually married Lambrino. It was not a clandestine
or morganatic marriage, but took place in the cathedral of Odessa, fully
solemnized. The Rumanian supreme court annulled the marriage and
Carol was angry enough to abdicate. But after a year or so he tired of
Lambrino, and in the crush of war both marriage and abdication were
allowed to be forgotten. Lambrino bore Carol a son, by name I^Iircea.
She was very fond of Carol. Not so fond, however, that she did not
sue him, when she arrived in exile in Paris, for ten million francs.

Carol, still more or less a boy in the hands of Marie and the Bratianu
bosses, was told to take a trip around the world to recuperate and forget.
He got as far from Rumania as Switzerland, where he met Princess
Helene, the daughter of King Constantine of Greece, whose son George,
by the efficient management of Marie, was to marry Carol's sister Eliza-

440

INSIDE EUROPE

beth, Carol decided to settle down. He married Helene. This was in
March, 1921. The royal couple returned to Bucharest and prepared to
live happily ever after.

But shortly thereafter Carol met Magda Lupescu, and a new phase of
Rumanian history began.

Carol had come by this time to open conflict with Jon Bratianu, the
dictator. He resented Bratianu’s influence, and had served formal notice
that when he became king he would wipe out the Bratianu-Stirbey clique.
Bratianu was no person to take a threat like this lying down. Carol's
affair with Lupescu was becoming a bit olE a scandal, and it gave Bratianu
a chance to strike. Carol was sent off to represent Rumania at the funeral
in London of Queen Alexandra. This duty performed, he met Lupescu
in Milan. They were going to Venice together, but he found a message
telling him to return to Bucharest at once, without his mistress, or for-
feit the succession. Bratianu had prevailed on Ferdinand and Marie thus
to ‘‘discipline" their son. Carol flashed into temper, refused to return.
Thereupon, with extreme haste, Bratianu wangled a crown council into
accepting Carol's “abdication."

Carol thus began his five years' exile. During this time Lupescu never
once left his side.

Ferdinand died in 1927, and Carol's six-year-old son Michael — ^by
Helene — became king. Then, more important, Jon Bratianu died, and
the clique lost power when a peasant chieftain, Juliu Maniu, took ad-
vantage of the troubled situation to assert leadership ; he became prime
minister. The remnants of the Bratianu gang wanted Carol out. Maniu,
patriotically eager to preserve the dynasty, wanted him back. Maniu's
idea was that the divorce between Carol and Helene made during the
exile should be annulled, and that Carol might then really settle down.
So he arranged for Carol to return by means of the celebrated coup of
June, 1930, when the exiled prince flew back to Bucharest Carol pro-
claimed himself king, unseating his boy, Michael, and thus taking a
throne that had already been held by both his father and his son.

Maniu, as we shall see, reckoned without Lupescu. He had assumed
Carol would desert her. He was wrong.

The Lady

Magda Lupescu is, beyond doubt, one of the most remarkable women
of the time. She is fortyish now, and getting fat ; nevertheless Carol is
still devoted to her, and life without her is unthinkable for him. She is

CAROL, LUPESCU, AND RUMANIA 441

a king’s favorite in the grand line of Du Barry and de Pompadour.
Her personal influence on him is probably, on the whole, good, but the
fact that she is Jewish, and has come to head a sort of secret govern-
ment within a government, has had serious political consequences.

Lupescu is in fact only half-Jewish. She was born in Jassy, the daugh-
ter of the keeper of an apothecary shop named Wolff. He changed his
name to Lupescu, the Rumanian equivalent, in order to get permission
to practice as a chemist, since only a certain proportion of Jews were
allowed to enter the professions. On a trip to Vienna he met a Roman
Catholic girl and married her. Lupescu was the child of his marriage.
She was actually baptized a Roman Catholic.

She met Carol in 1923 in Sinaia, the summer capital, where his coterie
of bucks and bloods went to hunt and play roulette. Previously she had
married an army officer; when Carol became attentive she quietly di-
vorced him. A woman of great intelligence and commanding personality,
with flaming red hair, her charms were such that Carol gave up a
throne for her.

Until recently she lived at No. 2 Alea Vulpache, in a two-story
red brick villa at the left of the Polish legation, near the corner of the
Alea Alexandria, in the residential outskirts of Bucharest. There is a big
garden, and the visitor is impressed by a row of chicken-coops along
one wall. Leghorns and Plymouth Rocks, also a couple of turkeys,
scamper and strut behind the wire. The story is that not only does
Lupescu tend these domestic creatures, but with her own hands helped
the carpenters build the sheds and coops.

She and Carol cannot live together openly. This w^ould not be too
great a shock for Rumanian morals, but it would be politically impru-
dent. Everyone in the kingdom knows that she is his mistress, and she is
openly attacked as such in speeches and pamphlets by the opposition,
but a certain discretion is necessary in Carol’s personal routine. Some-
times she motors downtown at night and enters the palace grounds by
a garden gate. In the garden, separate from the palace but connected
with it by a passage, is a small cottage. The palace, be it understood, is
situated on the main street of Bucharest, in a location comparable to that
of Fifth Avenue in New York or Piccadilly in London. So privacy is
difficult. Therefore, Carol and Lupescu live as much as possible in the
mountain village where they first met, Sinaia.

People resent Lupescu for a variety of reasons. Some of the princely
families which had ruled and pillaged Rumania for so long simply can-

442

INSIDE EUROPE

not endure it that Carol lives such an irregular personal life. Many
other Rumanians, both patrician and of common stock, would not mind
if the King had twenty mistresses, but they dislike Lupescu’s Jewish-
ness. Above all, she has come to typify and concentrate the opposition
of the politicians, for the special reason that she has become a politician
in her own right, and the most important one in the kingdom — ^head of
the palace camarilla.

This camarilla grew up partly because Carol, in his unwedded state,
could not have a queen and a regular court, partly because he was nat-
urally attached to a few old cronies. Tlfese were friends of Lupescu
also. The camarilla, as it originally existed, was led by a man named
Poui Dimitrescu, for many years the King’s private secretary. The first
camarilla was broken up early in 1934, following the assassination of the
prime minister, Jon Duca, by fanatical adherents of the Iron Guard, a
Fascist organization pledged to extirpate Lupescu and all her friends.
But a new camarilla took its place.

Lupescu has friends in all the key positions of the realm. She has her
own secret service. She puts people in the big jobs. She has, in fact,
almost usurped the functions of the prime minister ; no prime minister
can rule independently of her, yet she is not responsible to anyone. She
isn’t, even her enemies admit, interfering with things badly, but noth-
ing important can be done without her consent; and this infuriates the
politicians. Her activity of course enhances her value to the King, be-
cause she is the convenient instrument whereby he exercises extracur-
ricular functions — so necessary to the fun of kingship, especially in
Rumania, where everything is ‘'fixed.”

Two people have dared come out in the open against Lupescu. One
is Maniu. He gets away with it because, to date, the King can touch him
only at the risk of a revolution. But Maniu lost his job as prime min-
ister on Lupescu’s account. The other was Colonel Vladimir Precup.
This officer was the agent chiefly responsible for the outside arrange-
ments of Carol’s coup d'etat when he flew back to Rumania. For years
he was one of Carol’s best friends, along with the all-powerful private
secretary, Dimitrescu. Later Precup thought that Lupescu’s influence
on Carol was ruining the country and he concocted a fantastic plot to
get rid of her. He was arrested, dismissed from the army, and sentenced
to ten years in jail.

One person dared to combat her — ^to a point. He was, and is, Nicolas
Titulescu, for years Rumania’s voluble and eccentric foreign minister.

CAROL, LUPESCU, AND RUMANIA

443

After the Duca killing, Titulescu declined to enter the cabinet until there
was a house-cleaning. He refused to serve in any government so long
as the King was surrounded by a gang which aroused the Iron Guard
to murder. Titulescu was indispensable to Carol, as the only Rumanian
with a European prestige in international matters. As price for his entry
in the government, he demanded the break-up of the old camarilla. For
a week the struggle went on between Lupescu, the King’s mistress, and
Titulescu, who is uninterested in mistresses. Titulescu won — ^provi-
sionally. But he was far too shrewd to threaten the position of Lupescu
herself.

Lupescu is practically an ideal mistress, were it not for politics. She
is not frivolous ,* on the contrary her discretion is notorious. Not forty
people in Bucharest, outside her own circle, have ever seen her. She is
not avaricious; indeed she learned the value of cold cash during the
years of exile, and she persuades Carol to save his money. She is, ac-
cording to all gossip, faithful to him, and this in a country monstrously
licentious. She has no desire to marry Carol. She knows it would be
the end of the dynasty. Nor has she encumbered him with illegitimate
children. And Madame de Montespan, be it remembered, inflicted on
Louis XIV seven.^ Indeed, Magda Lupescu is a striking anachronism.
Kings are dull folks these days, and royal favorites, like court jesters,
have practically fled the field.

They tell a little story in Bucharest to the effect that her father scolded
her severely at the time that Carol’s brother, Nicholas, was indulging
in amorous and scandalous affairs. Carol had settled, as it were, down.
But Nicholas was acting up. Against his brother’s orders he had com-
mitted marriage with a certain Madame Saveanu. Carol had done some-
thing exactly similar in his youth, but there is no puritan like a re-
formed rake and he was wild with fury; Nicholas, he said, was bringing
a bad name to the crown. Bucharest rocked, especially at the report that
Nicholas blacked his royal brother’s eye. And old Lupescu came to
Magda saying, '‘Daughter, daughter, what kind of a family are you
getting mixed up with !”

Royal Rapscallion

Carol to-day is rather portly, with something of a midriff ; he is in
his late forties. He is vain, stubborn, willful, and by no means unin-

^Occasionally rumors crop up that Lupescu is to be married off to someone*
Also reports of CaroFs ‘^engagement” to a German princess were recently heard

INSIDE EUROPE

444

telligent. He has very little sense of humor. He speaks letter-perfect
English with a hint of German accent, letter-perfect French with a hint
of English accent, and letter-perfect German with a hint of French
accent. Even his Rumanian is not quite perfect — familiar symptom of
the polyglot training of Balkan kings.

He is pretty well off. His personal salary is $363,635 per year (at
present exchange) and, contrary to general opinion, he lives fairly
modestly and must be able to save a third of it. One Bucharest estimate
gives him savings, deposited mostly in banks or securities abroad, of

20,000,000 French francs, or something over a million dollars. The
official civil list is the following:

King Carol
Ex-Queen Helene
Crown Prince Michael
Traveling expenses

40,000,000 lei ($363,635)

7,000,000 ($ 63,630)

7.000. 000 ” ($ 63,630)

6.000. 000 ” ($ 54,545)

Carol's relations with his whole family are indifferent, except with
his son, Michael, the only lad in history who has been king of a country
once and may with reasonable expectation be king of the same country
again. His system for Michael's education is eminently sensible, Carol
having realized how bad his own education was. But Carol persistently
avoided his mother ; he has exiled his ex-wife, Helene ; he and Nicholas
are far from friendly: and he is said to dislike his sister Ileana, now
wife of the Archduke Anton Habsburg, who is the nicest of all the royal
Rumanians.

Carol has very few friends ; few kings, indeed, can afford the luxury
of friendship. He is apt to be rude and overbearing, and on his dignity ;
people find it hard to talk to him. There is an ugly, jagged streak of
maladjustment in his character, possibly caused by jealousy of his
mother. His closest friend is probably Titianu, the man who is under-
secretary of the interior in all cabinets; another intimate is Professor
Nicolas Jorga, the fantastic pundit who was his tutor in his youth, who
became professor of universal history at the University of Bucharest
at the age of twenty-two, and who has written two hundred and fifty-
seven different books and pamphlets.

Until very recently Carol was not a dictator. The plain truth was that
he had no need to be. He was willing to practice almost any compromise
to save himself from the danger of overt dictatorial rule, because he took

CAROL, LUPESCU, AND RUMANIA

44S

good note of the fate of his royal cousins, Alfonso of Spain and Alex-
ander of Jugoslavia. He did not need to exert dictatorial power largely
because of the Rumanian electoral law, by which the party getting forty
per cent of the votes takes a thirty per cent bonus of the seats in the
chamber. And Rumanian politics are such that a government in office
is never voted out ; the king determines the time for a shake-up, super-
intends the appointment of a new ministry, and then this ministry makes
new elections and always wins them.

After Duca was killed the King suddenly developed an extremely dip-
lomatic illness, which prevented him from attending the funeral of the
murdered prime minister. He feared the Iron Guard might bomb the
cathedral where the services were being held. The decision to stay away
was made at the last moment. Charts prepared in advance had shown
where he would be. He wasn’t there. Whispers surged through Bucharest
that Carol was hiding in his palace, paralyzed with fear. Possibly he was
only being prudent. But he lost a fine chance to prove that bullets which
could kill a prime minister could not scare a king.

Mother Marie

There should be another word about Marie. She was a gorgeous
woman until the end. There are large sections of purest nonsense in her
autobiography, a book she never should have written; but from child-
hood she was an exhibitionist. She was born with no sense of envy, no
jealousy; she had not the faintest shadow of inferiority complex; she
might have been a superb actress, for her dramatic ability was extreme.

The tragedy of her life was the failure of her personal relations with
Carol. She spoiled him as a youngster, and she always loved him deeply,
but she could not take him seriously as a king. He remained a boy to her.
It was almost impossible for her to resist thinking that he was being
absurd when he was acting like a monarch. And this he detested. In
contrast, Lupescu’s hold on Carol came partly because she does see him
for what he after all is, King of Rumania.

Marie was deeply fond of young Michael and hoped desperately that
he would grow up with her character in his bones, that he would skip
the generation of his father. She wanted him to get a good education,
marry a princess, be a good king. She did everything possible to salve
the unhappiness of his situation vis-a-vis his parents. Lupescu, inciden-
tally, sees Michael casually but regularly, and is fond of him.

One is apt to forget what a first-class political queen Marie was. In

INSIDE EUROPE

446

the modern world royalty should earn its keep. Marie not only gave
Rumania six children; she more than doubled its population and terri-
tory. An Englishwoman, she influenced Ferdinand, a German and a
Hohenzollern, to side with the Allies instead of the Central Powers dur-
ing the war ; and thus at a stroke converted Rumania from a somewhat
ridiculous semi-principality to the seventh largest country in continental
Europe.

Marie was out of the political picture for some years, until her sudden
death in 1938.

More Fascist Scurvy

Not more than two blocks from the town palace where Carol lives
is a hotel which, to put it mildly, expresses much of the spirit of Bucha-
rest, amorously and politically. In this hotel, almost every afternoon,
two or three young men, well dressed and multilingual, sit and sip
Turkish coffee and talk about revolution. They are members of the Iron
Guard.

This organization was founded in 1927 by a young zealot, Cornelieu
Codreanu, who was of Polish not Rumanian origin ; his real name was
Zelinski. At first he called it the “Legion of the Archangel Michael.”
Its program was a fanatic, obstreperous sub-Fascism on a strong na-
tionalist and anti-Semitic basis. Its members trooped through the coun-
tryside, wore white costumes, carried burning crosses, impressed the
ignorant peasantry, aroused the students in the towns. Presently its en-
rolled strength was two hundred thousand men.

Codreanu believed in overt violence ; in fact he once shot and wounded
the Mayor of Jassy, whom he accused of being pro-Semite. But his
movement was only a sort of unpleasant eczema on the face of the land
until Hitlerism came to power in the Reich. Then it straightway reached
considerable political importance, because if the Iron Guard came to
power, it might transfer Rumania’s traditional allegiance from France
to Germany. Meanwhile, the person of Magda Lupescu was a perpetual
red flag in the faces of Iron Gurdsmen. Finally Duca, the prime min-
ister, was murdered by the Iron Guard desperadoes.

After the murder the Iron Guard split up. The common explanation
is that Lupescu and her group of friends, realizing that the danger was
serious, tried a simple Rumanian expedient, bribery. Codreanu, it is com-
monly said, was removed from the scene by outright purchase, and the
leadership of the organization passed to another man, Nicolai Stelescu.

CAROL, LUPESCU, AND RUMANIA

447

Officially, Stelescu and his men separated from Codreanii because they
did not believe in terrorism. Stelescu sought to make the Iron Guard
respectable. It was forbidden as a legal party, but he tried to fight by
legal means. He was a youngster of thirty, a fanatic, an idealist, with
a council of advisers who worshiped him. In July, 1936, he was mur-
dered by rival Iron Guardists, as he lay in a hospital bed.

After Stelescu’s death his formidable rival Codreanu became impor-
tant again. Rumania had an agitated time For a brief period a violent
anti-Semite named Goga was .prime minister ; he was followed by the
aged patriarch of the orthodox church, Miron Cristea. ^lore and more,
the King was having to govern the country himself — ^under martial law.
In 1938 Codreanu was arrested, and then murdered in sensational cir-
cumstances with thirteen Iron Guard comrades. They were all shot
while being moved from one prison to another, on the pretext that they
sought to ‘'escape.’’ A fantastic creature named Armand Calinescu was
minister of the interior at the time. He accepted full responsibility —
and then became prime minister. Calinescu was a Maniu man. He was
only a bit over five feet tall, but tough. He always wore a black patch
over one eye. He bade fair to create a real dictatorial government for
Carol, but he was himself murdered by Iron Guardists late in 1939 —
as reprisal for the murder of Codreanu.

Men of the Iron Guard say that they expect to come to power through
country-wide agitation centralized in local clubs called “Cult de Patrie.”
They intend to eliminate political parties when they reach power, but to
leave the King alone, if he gives Lupescu up. They talk of the King
quite respectfully. They deny that the organization is any longer financed
by Hitler. They say, in fact, that when their men visited Rosenberg, in
Berlin, he was astonished that they did not want money and compli-
mented them on being the only Balkan sub-Hitler group which had ever
come to Berlin without begging.

One section of the Iron Guard recently became allied to the great
National Peasant party of Juliu Maniu. This is an important develop-
ment. Maniu thinks he is using the Iron Guard; they are his shock
troops. The Iron Guard assumes it is using Maniu; he is their political
tactician. Other leaders, other parties, joined for a time this informal
common-front, like the dissident liberals of George Bratianu, and the ad-
herents of General Averescu, Rumania’s chief war hero. All are linked
by common hatred of Lupescu.

448

INSIDE EUROPE

Maniu Tells His Story

One of the finest characters in all the Balkans, in fact in all Europe,
and certainly the most distinguished citizen of Rumania, is Juliu Maniu.
Ascetic, incorruptible, stately, devout, Maniu is a Transylvanian, the son
of a peasant. He is a bachelor. Like Matchek in Croatia, whom his
career resembles, he is a Roman Catholic; he was educated as a Jesuit.
He has no interest in women, in money, or in personal power; he is
that rare thing, a Rumanian patriot for Rumania’s sake

Maniu was born in 1873. Before the war he was a deputy in the
Hungarian parliament, representing the (then) Rumanian minority. His
health is not good. His faults as a politician are an unyielding stub-
bornness and inability to compromise ; and his mind, tenacious enough,
is slow-moving. He is capable of immense disinterestedness. He resigned
the premiership because he was convinced Carol had treated Helene
unjustly. He resigned his presidency of the National Peasant party be-
cause he felt that Carol’s dislike of him prejudiced the party’s chances
of political success.

Maniu’s first great achievement was binding together two wings of
the submerged opposition, just after the war, and making a united
force of it. From the old kingdom came the “peasant” (Tsaranist) half
of the party; from Transylvania and the other districts acquired by the
peace treaties came the “national” half. Rumania had a decent govern-
ment for the first time in history when Maniu became prime minister.
He tried to promote essential governmental economies and reforms ; he
set about reorganizing agriculture and the railways ; above all — a, nega-
tive but valuable accomplishment — ^he ended the vicious Bratianu tyranny.

What is more, Maniu did something for which he got small thanks
later — ^he brought King Carol back.

The world has heard a great deal of that dazzling airplane coup in
June, 1930, whereby Carol regained his throne. The true story of that
coup has never been written. It is assumed that Carol, with the aid of a
couple of gallant desperadoes, did the job himself. He was described as
a hard-flying prince, a modern Allan Quartermaine, a hero. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Carol did nothing whatever to bring
himself back except get in the airplane. The whole business was en-
gineered, inside Rumania, by Maniu.

His motives were clear. He knew that Carol, outside the country,
was a perpetual focus of unrest and intrigue. He was aware that the

CAROL, LUPESCU, AND RUMANIA 449

regency was weak and he believed strongly in the three essential condi-
tions of monarchist institutions: stability, continuity, authority. More-
over, he knew that inasmuch as the "‘Liberal’' (Bratianu) party was
against Carol, his own National Peasant party, on realistic grounds,
should favor him. Logic compelled him to try to bring the errant prince
home. But he wanted him home without Lupescu.

Deeply disillusioned years after, J^Ianiu himself wrote the whole story,
as a speech which he was refused permission to deliver m the Ru-
manian parliament on December 12, 1934. It recounts in full detail his
incessant maneuvers on behalf of Carol even while Ferdinand was still
alive. When Ferdinand died Maniu's activities redoubled. He committed
the National Peasant party to the idea of Carol’s restoration, sounded
out the regency, and carefully tested public opinion. Following is part
of the speech, which has never before been published :

"The impatience of H.R.H. Prince Carol (to return to Rumania) was
growing, but he showed not the least sign of an intention to separate
from Madame Lupescu. ... In all conversations which I had with
H.R.H. the Princess Mother Helene, I tried to remove her explicable
bitterness toward H.R.H. Prince Carol, with the aim that should Prince
Carol return the ground would be spiritually prepared for a reconcilia-
tion. . . . H.R.H. Prince Carol judged my foresight as indecision.

*"My attitude, which was confirmed by messages I received, was not
caused by hesitation but by the fact that for me two things were impor-
tant: first, I needed assurance from H.R.H. Prince Carol that ... he
intended to reign in a constitutional manner and not through personal
friends; and secondly, that he would separate from Madame Lupescu,
whose fatal influence on Prince Carol enshadows him . .

Maniu proceeds to relate how he sent an emissary to Paris to sound
out Carol; the emissary saw not only the Prince, but Lupescu herself,
who swore that she could not upset plans by returning to Rumania with
him. She is quoted as having said: '‘The day that H.R H, is restored to
the throne for the happiness of the country, I shall disappear forever, and
my only wish is that hereafter no one shall speak of me/’ Maniu, cautious,
wanted this declaration implemented by a statement from Carol. He
determined to send Nicholas to see him. He proceeds:

‘"In this situation, one day at the end of May, 1930,^ Major Precup,
well known to me, a devoted supporter of H.R.H. Prince Carol, pre-
sented himself and informed me that he had been to see H.R.H. Prince
Carol, who begged him to ascertain what my final attitude would be
were H.R.H. Prince Carol one day to decide to return home. I charged

INSIDE EUROPE

45*0

Major Precup to say to HR.H Prince Carol that there was no need
for such a step because Prince Nicholas on July iSth would leave for
TWis and meet H R.H. Prince Carol and discuss matters until I could
come myself.

“I asked Major Precup about Madame Lupescu. He replied : ‘She is
not returning to the country.’ I then told him that in that event, if . . .
H.R.H. Prince Carol should decide independently to return, he would
not find an enemy but a good friend in me.”

Maniu then details the astounding labors he went through preparing
for the event. He tended to every detail. He called Colonel Manolescu,
the adjutant of Prince Nicholas, and communicated with Nicholas. He
arranged that the minister of war. General Condescu, should prepare
troops at Cluj and Jassy to receive Carol, and that the garrison in
Bucharest should be on duty at the airplane field. He informed the
cabinet and the regents, and arranged that one of the regents, Sarateanu,
should resign his place so that Carol could take it. He even arranged
for a room for Carol to sleep in at the palace.

Carol arrived ; and at five the next morning Maniu was informed that
he wished to be proclaimed King at once. Maniu had had the different
idea that Carol should first enter the regency, until his marital affairs
were adjusted and the country got used to the new regime. Carol was
insistent. Maniu dutifully and with some difficulty procured the consent
of the regency and then held a cabinet meeting:

“Five ministers voted for the entry of H.R.H. Prince Carol into the
regency, while six were in favor of his being proclaimed King. My view
was the minority, but several ministers said they were prepared to sub-
mit to my decision, whatever it might be. . . . During the cabinet meet-
ing a large delegation of members of parliament of our party had come
to see me. I received them. They were of the opinion that H R.H. Prince
Carol should be proclaimed King immediately and begged me not to
obstruct their desires. I saw at once the problem had taken a turning
from which no efforts of mine could divert it, even though it was ob-
vious what evil results would follow if H R.H. Prince Carol were pro-
claimed King without first having arranged the question of Princess
Helene and Madame Lupescu. . . . But I could not force my views in
the face of public opinion . . . and it was too late to obtain the results
at which I had aimed. I therefore took recourse to the only logical and
honorable solution; I . . . resigned.”

Carol, after a few days, was compelled to reaccept Maniu as prime
minister. Maniu proceeds:

“Immediately after the formation of the government, in accord with

CAROL, LUPESCU, AND RUMANIA 451

the wishes of H.IM, the King, I proposed that the coronation be held
without delay. I fixed the date between September 15 and 20, 1930,
and established that H.M. the King should be crowned together with
Princess Mother Helene. I presented the program of the coronation and
took the preliminary measures at Alba Julia. Tired but glad at the result
obtained, I left for a two weeks' holiday.

‘‘Upon my return I found the situation entirely changed. H.M. the
King no longer wanted to hear of the coronation The situation which,
to my great joy, had been improving, tending to become more normal,
had been aggravated. I did not know how this change had come
about. ...

“Then, accidentally, I learned that IMadame Lupescu had returned to
the country. I refused to believe it. I made inquiry of the directors of
the Security Service, Messrs. Cadere and Bianu. They denied it. I asked
M. Vaida ; he knew nothing. I was again informed that Madame Lupescu
had returned. I again asked IM. Bianu, who replied that it was another
Madame Lupescu. I learned, however, that she had returned on August
4, ^930, and that she was slopping at Foisor Palace."

Shortly thereafter Maniu resigned again. He was “extremely tired"
and saw that “under these conditions government with results was not
possible." The King, he records, received his resignation with “evident
pleasure." Maniu learned the lesson that royalty does not like to be too
much indebted to its subjects. What had happened was that Carol tried
to give Lupescu up. He stuck it out alone for just two months. Then he
found life unbearable without her.

Diplomat De Luxe

Another Rumanian politician worth note is the fabulous ex-foreign
minister, Nicolai Titulescu. He looks like a mongoloid monkey; he is
the best conversationalist in the Balkans; he owns most of the journalists
in Bucharest ; he is the one man in Rumania trusted by the French general
staff ; he is torrentially voluble in half a dozen languages ; his wit and
unquenchable vivacity are famous all over Europe; he wears an over-
coat indoors, even on the hottest day; he is No. 2 on the death list of
the Iron Guard ; he has twice been president of the League of Nations
Assembly and in 1935 was president of both the Little Entente and the
Balkan Entente, comprising populations of almost seventy million people.

Carol, jealous of Titulescu, booted him from office while he was ill
and in France on a holiday.

George Tatarescu, Carol's premier off and on since 1935, a young
“Liberal," took his job.

452

INSIDE EUROPE

Germany or USS.RJ

Rumania was the second country in the former ring of the Little
Entente. Its army is not very good but its resources in oil (one-third
owned by British companies) are enormous and it is of great strategic
importance in the French system of alliances throughout Europe. And
as we know, the British guaranteed Rumania in the spring of 1939.
Neither the British nor French would like to lose Rumania. And they
have no intention of doing so.

Yet Rumania has been tempted on occasion to German leanings. There
are several reasons :

(1) Rumania's chief crop is grain and Germany is potentially its best
market. France and Rumania’s partners in the Little Entente and Balkan
Entente (Jugoslavia, Turkey, and Greece) are able to buy very little
Rumanian grain. Germany could buy it all — for a political price. Thus
a Rumanian-German trade agreement — ^all but forced on Rumania by
Germany — came in 1939.

(2) Not only is anti-Semitism very acute in Rumania, but there exists
a German minority of 800,000 Saxons ; these naturally feel the swastika
itch. Besides the Iron Guard there are at least three Fascist parties in
Rumania.

(3) Rumania’s chief enemy is Hungary. France is not near enough
to help Rumania in the event of war with Hungary, even if it were
willing to. When war broke out in 1939, it became increasingly possible
that Germany might egg Hungary on in an attempt to seize its lost
Transylvanian provinces from Rumania.

(4) Carol is half a Hohenzollem. And like many men with power
who would like more power, he probably has a surreptitious admiration
for Hitler.

The Franco-Soviet arrangement, on the other hand, tended to keep
Rumania in line, while it lasted. For years Rumania feared a Russian
attempt to regain Bessarabia, the rich province along the Dniester which
Rumania seized from the U.S.S.R. after the war. In 1934 the Bolsheviks
renounced aggressive intentions toward Bessarabia But after the Russo-
German pact of 1939 and the Russian invasion of Poland, Rumania be-
gan again to fear that it might lose Bessarabia some day.

Chapter XXXI

Jugoslavia After Alexander

pETER II, Europe’s youngest monarch, seventeen years old, King of
* Jugoslavia in succession to his murdered father, Alexander,' is titular
ruler of some powerful Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Slavones,

Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Dalmatians, united in the King-
dom of Jugoslavia. He was a shy and awkward boy. The trouble seems
to have been a considerably mangled education. Through carelessness,
or ignorance, or both, his father and mother brought him up badly. His
only teacher until he was ten was an English “Nanny,” Miss Crowther,
who was a governess, not a professionaly trained teacher. She was a
worthy character and devoted to the backward, lonely child, but her
share in his training should have ended when he reached school age.

The King, Alexander, only realized this shortly before his death, and
it was Queen Marie of Rumania, the boy’s grandmother, who stepped
in and insisted on some proper education for the prince. So he was sent
to England to school. Then his father was murdered and Peter, suc-
ceeding him, returned to Jugoslavia and was unable to resume school
abroad, because the provisions of the Jugoslav constitution forbid the
monarch from leaving the country for any extended stay. It was a pity
Peter could not finish school in England. The next best thing was done ;
an English tutor, Parrott, was put in charge of him.

Peter learned the news of his father’s death from Queen Marie. She
didn’t know how to break the terrible news to him. Finally she said,
“Peter, you know people will call you Majesty now.” The boy burst into
tears, crying, “Grandmamma, I am too young to be a king.”

In strict contrast to Peter’s mismanaged education is the example of
his cousin Michael of Rumania. Father Carol has been very sensible
about Michael. He goes to school with twelve other boys picked from
all over the kingdom, and on terms of almost complete democracy with
them. The boys are chosen from different parts of Rumania — Transyl-
vania, Bessarabia, and so on — so that Michael will absorb different Ru-
manian characteristics, and they come from various walks of life : the
father of one, for instance, is a railway switchman ; another is the snn of

453

454

INSIDE EUROPE

a minor government official. The school, which sits in the palace, is
competently staffed, and Carol has the boys to lunch once a week or so.
As a result, Michael is a poised and confident youngster, and when he
and Peter are together, the contrast between his bright ebullience and
Peter’s shy timidity is striking.

Peter is one of the richest boys of his age in Europe, perhaps the
richest. The financial section of his father’s will has never been pub-
lished, but so far as is known, Peter is sole heir, and Alexander’s for-
tune was estimated at $10,000,000. Much of it — ^not a patriotic detail
from the viewpoint of orthodox nationalism — ^was held in bank accounts
abroad, not in Jugoslavia, and in foreign (not Jugoslav) securities. Alex-
ander differed from other dictators. Hitler or Mussolini, in having a
passionate acquisitiveness to money.

The Jugoslav civil list is paid as a whole to the King and the King
determines how it shall be apportioned in the family. Obviously a boy
of seventeen cannot do this and his cousin, the Regent Prince Paul, and
his mother have charge of the income, though purely as trustees. The
civil list is enormous, amounting to 55,000,000 dinars a year, or about
$1,250,000 at present exchange ; half of it is paid in dinars in Jugoslavia,
half deposited in Swiss francs abroad. Regent Paul’s allowance is 720,000
dinars a year, and in addition he gets a salary as Regent of 540,000
dinars, a total roughly equal to $28,800 — sl pittance compared to the
money at theoretical disposal of the boy.

Peter is a boy with a throne — ^and few playmates. He has $10,000,000
— ^and very little to spend it on. His income is somewhere around $3,000
a day and he earns it by being afflicted with kingship in the most ob-
streperous of Balkan countries. All the glamour of royalty, if there is
any, is hardly recompense for the formidable strain which accompanied
this unlucky lad’s adolescence. He should be playing football; instead
he has a court chamberlain behind the curtains. He has, moreover, the
most terrible prospect in the world ; he can never change his job, he is
Kang for life, he can never escape the steep walls of his own future.

Martyred Monarch

Alexander is dead, and his bullet-torn body lies in the Karageorge-
ovitch crypt in Oblenetz, near Belgrade, a highly decorated structure
that will look well in a century or two, when time has dimmed the
color of its burning mosaics. But to understand Jugoslavia, to chart even

JUGOSLAVIA AFTER ALEXANDER 455

an approximate projection of events, we must pause a moment and study
the dead king’s life and works.

In pictures, as Turn unvaryingly pointed out, he resembled a small-
towm dentist. In reality he looked like what he was — a King. He was
industrious, charming, capable of almost inexplicable sudden flights of
worry, temperament, and fury, yet disciplined and shrewd — a complex
character. He was both implacable and bright-hearted. He died at forty-
six, and he is stronger dead than alive, because his murder served to
unify his country.

First and last Alexander was a soldier. He fought all through the
war. He walked with common soldiers in the terrible retreat across
Serbia in 1915. Moral in his personal life to the point of austerity, he
despised his brother-in-law Carol as a wastrel and profligate. He liked
Boris of Bulgaria but was suspicious of his timidity and lackadaisical
qualities. It would have been unthinkable for Alexander, like Boris, to
walk the streets of his capital untended. He was brought up at the court
of the Tsar in Petrograd, where he w’as a page; the glitter and abso-
lutism of this resplendency dazzled him, permanently influenced his life.
He did not love pomp, but he did uncompromisingly love the display of
authority. He spent his large salary with extreme frugality; his only
extravagances were books and motor-cars. In the Dedinje library he had
twenty thousand books. He owned twenty-three motor-cars, all Packards ;
he was one of the largest individual owners of Packards in the world.

Like all dictators except Hitler, he was a tremendous worker. Alex-
ander rose early and was at his desk by eight ; his secretaries had to have
the whole of his day’s correspondence, papers, etc., ready for him at this
hour. At ten every day the audiences began. Every Monday he received
first the chief of the general staff, the town commandant of Belgrade,
and the chief of police. Security first was his watchword. He worked till
late in the evening, when, stupefied with fatigue, he either played bridge
with the Queen and a few close friends, or, like Hitler, listened to music.
He played the piano himself quite often, and fairly well. He never wore
civilian dress ; always uniform. In his reception-room the only ornaments
were showcases filled with models of field artillery and cross-sections of
shells, burnished till they glowed like jewels.

Behind Alexander, behind young Peter, are a couple of generations
of tne most turbulent Balkan genealogy imaginable. The family, the
Karageorgeovitch dynasty, is pure Serb ; unlike almost all other dynas-

INSIDE EUROPE

456

ties, it intermarried with other royalty only with extreme reluctance, and
then only with next-door Balkan neighbors. Alexander’s father, Peter I,
married the daughter of the King of Montenegro ; he himself went as
far as Bucharest to espouse Mane, daughter of Rumania’s Marie.

The Karageorgeovitch family (the name means “Black George”) was
descended from a haiduk, bandit chieftain, who freed Serbia from the
Turks in 1810 This original Black George was a person of some char-
acter. Aside from his patriotic exploits he is said to have murdered both
his own father, to keep him from capture by the Turks, and his own
brother, and he was himself assassinated. Through the nineteenth cen-
tury the family wound through Serbian history like a crimson rope.
Sometimes it was in power, sometimes out.

In 1903, when modern Jugoslav history began, the rulers of Serbia
were King Alexander Obrenovitch, who belonged to a rival dynasty,
and his Queen, a disreputable commoner named Draga. They were mur-
dered by officers owing allegiance to the Karageorgeovitch group, tem-
porarily in exile. The Karageorgeovitch who then ascended the throne,
Peter I, was the late Alexander’s father. He ruled till 1914, when Alex-
ander became Regent. Peter was afflicted with the family temperament.
A story, never proved and probably without foundation, says that he
murdered his wife, Zorka of Montenegro. At any rate he was a violently
unstable character. When his mind began to deteriorate, the clique of
officers who really ruled Serbia removed him from the throne.

The Regent should have been, not Alexander, but the eldest son,
George. But George, the Crown Prince, was unbalanced. He thrashed
his servants in violent fits of rage, and following a series of exciting
scandals, he was quietly certified as insane and removed to confinement
in a fortress at Nisch.^ There, in 1939, he still was.

Alexander, be it hastily said, inherited none of these Karageorge-
ovitch qualities. He was neither a murderer nor a madman. He was a
King conscientious to the point of stuffiness, and, a complete patriot, he
did what he thought was best for the country. A large section of the
country, as we shall see below, wanted something different, and Alex-
ander’s abrasiveness did not make negotiations easy; but the monarch,
even though his egoism may have been distorted by the family history,
was incorruptibly sincere. The tragedy was that he drove the country
to the verge of chaos, through his method of trying to unite it.

^ Gedye, op, cit, quotes an Italian journalist who describes how George practiced
with a revolver by shooting cigarettes out of the mouth of his unhappy valet.

JUGOSLAVIA AFTER ALEXANDER 457

So much for Peter's family and Peter's father. It is not a wholesome
heritage.

Prince Paul, the first Regent, was a cousin of Alexander's, and his
nearest competent adult relative. Therefore the King had to choose him,
simply to preserve the dynasty, although it was said that they were not
close friends. Paul was educated at Oxford, the worst possible training-
ground for a man of action. His wife, Princess Olga, is the sister of the
Duchess of Kent. He loves books, music, pictures, the life of a country
gentleman. He would like to die, when he must, in bed, a feat only one
Karageorgeovitch ruler has accomplished (and that one, Peter I, was
insane). He is, the Serbs say, “too English," and indeed he is more at
ease with foreigners than with his own people.

Paul never had much desire to be Regent. The panoply of royalty
may induct him into appreciation of its glamour, but certainly he would
prefer less glamour if he could get it with less responsibility. It is no
joke, being the ruler of a country like Jugoslavia. Paul was unable to
sleep during the first few months of his regency except with the aid of
sedatives, so the gossips said.

Paul has a pleasant personality, and people are not afraid of him,
afraid to tell him the truth, as they were afraid of Alexander. Although
at first he was quite approachable, now his appointments are carefully
watched. One of the curses of Balkan politics has descended on him —
army intrigue. When Paul takes a walk — for exercise — ^the affair is
almost tragi-comedy. One motor-car filled with troops immediately pre-
cedes him through the wooded road, another immediately follows him ;
the route is lined with soldiers and Paul and his consort amble along,
suffocated by gasoline fumes, unable to admire a bird or tree without
a sentry jumping.

Paul has given the country a good administration during a trying
period. He fought the old Serbs when they tried to hush up the King's
testament. His influence has been on the conciliatory side, and it was
he who sensibly persuaded his first prime minister, Bogolub Yevtitch,
to release Matchek, the chief of the Croat opposition, from jail His
next prime minister, Milan Stoyadinovitch, held office for several years,
but lost it when Paul thought that he was too Fascist-minded and 53^1-
pathetic to the Rome-Berlin axis. The prime minister in 1939 was a

INSIDE EUROPE

458

comparative unknown named Tsvetkovitch, of gypsy descent. He is very
close to Paul and to the important Slovene leader, Father Koroshetz.

The other two Regents are Radekno Stankovitch, who was Alex-
ander’s personal physician, and Ivan Perovitch, former governor of
Croatia. Neither Stankovitch nor Perovitch is an orthodox Serb, and
the appointments caused alarm in Belgrade. Apparently the King chose
them for reasons which were Balkan-typical. They were personally
honest men, a rare distinction, and neither colorful nor likely to become
big popular heroes. Moreover, Stankovitch and Perovitch don’t like each
other; the King was aware of this and knew that they would quarrel
and that, therefore, one of them would always be on Paul’s side, thus
giving Paul the majority in any decision.

Stankovitch, a good doctor, cured Alexander of a troublesome stomach
ailment after half a dozen foreign specialists had failed. Stankovitch
simply said: ‘'Your Majesty, nothing is wrong with you except nerves.
There is no organic ailment. Forget it, and you will be well.” The King
discovered himself cured through this simple process, and asked Stanko-
vitch what he could do to reward him. Stankovitch replied with an
Oriental parable. Once, he said, the Sultan of Turkey had greatly bene-
fited from the advice of an obscure courtier; asked what reward he
wanted, the courtier replied, “Talk to me conspicuously at your next
reception.” The Sultan did so. The court watched in envy and excite-
ment. The courtier’s name was soon on everyone’s lips. This man, it
seemed, was the King’s favorite. So the Grand Vizier offered him a
job. And then another job. And finally the inconspicuous courtier became
Grand Vizier,

The story may be apocryphal, but it is a fact that Stankovitch, com-
pletely unknown politically, became minister of education after the
King’s recovery. Then his rise was rapid. And now he is a Regent. He
is generally unpopular. People say that he has never forgotten or forgiven
any person who slighted him in the long years when he was obscure.

Perovitch, the third Regent, has more quality. Louis Adamic writes
of him respectfully, and I know no higher tribute for a politician in
Jugoslavia. He is not a Croat, as usually reported, but a Dalmatian. His
rule as governor of Croatia was better-minded than that of his prede-
cessors, though pressure from Belgrade prevented him from being really
moderate. He is, of course, an ardent centralist, believing in the “es-
sential, natural homogeneity of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.”

JUGOSLAVIA AFTER ALEXANDER

459

Psychology of Assassination

Another name should be mentioned at this point, the name of Vlada
Georgiev, the King’s assassin. By what mysterious sequence of causality
did Alexander, the monarch, and Georgiev, the killer, meet at that pre-
cise moment on the cobbled streets of Marseilles? Almost everyone saw
the remarkable film of the assassination. Its great quality of emotion
came from the fact that the audience knew, from the time the King
stepped off the boat, that he would be dead in ninety seconds. And the
King did not know this.

Georgiev was a Macedonian terrorist. This means in Balkan ter-
minology that he was a ‘‘patriot” and an “idealist.” He believed in a
free Macedonia; the object of his group, in other words, was to wrest
the Serb part of Macedonia from the Jugoslav government and unite
it with the Bulgarian segments of that forlorn, invisible province. A
Macedonian movement to this end has existed for forty years. The even-
tual hope is the erection of an independent or autonomous Macedonia;
failing this, which is a political impossibility, to unite Macedonia with
Bulgaria.

The Macedonian organization, the I.M.R.0 , was led by a redoubtable
chieftain, Ivan Mihailov. He was a sort of Robin Hood murderer, never
attacking the virtuous, but only the Serbs. Mihailov and his men per-
fected a government within a government that had its own army and
police, its own courier service, its own taxation and standards of law
and justice. The arm of the organization was long and relentless. A
traitor never escaped. Mihailov’s wife, for instance, followed an enemy
all the way to the Burg Theater in Vienna and there shot him. Georgiev
was Mihailov’s chauffeur.

The Macedonians split into factions, and Georgiev first distinguished
himself by patriotic slaughter of members of the anti-Mihailov group.
He killed two notable figures, the communist Hadzidimov and the mod-
erate Tomalevsky. Then, although the Bulgarian government of the day
protected the Macedonians, he was forced to flee. He devoted himself
to two projects. These dominated his able and distorted intelligence. He
became a fanatic, and the most dangerous kind of fanatic, one with a
cold heart. One of his projects, on which he labored for years, was to
blow up the League of Nations building at Geneva. The other was to kill
Alexander. Georgiev never got around to blowing up the League. . . •

INSIDE EUROPE

460

The year 1934 produced a veritable carnival of political assassinations :
Dollfuss, Roehm, Schleicher, Duca, Alexander, Louis Barthou, the
Polish minister of the interior Pieracki, and Serge Kirov, the second
man in Soviet Russia. There was a precise common denominator to
several of them, which were performed by fanatics with the purpose of
overthrowing or weakening the regime in power and opening the way for
a government more representative of the common people. Constan-
tinescu, the murderer of Duca ; Planetta, the Dollf uss-killer ; Georgiev,
the assassin of Alexander, and the Ukrainian who killed Pieracki were
all good democrats, though they called themselves Iron Guardists, Nazis,
and the like.

What is the psychological basis of the desire to kill ? In Vienna Dr.
Wilhelm Stekel, discussing this problem, told me that most political mur-
derers are offshoots of a distorted father fixation. Cranks and anarchists,
who seek out and kill statesmen to satisfy some mysterious personal
grievance, are usually psychic invalids as a result of some unhappy ex-
perience in childhood ; often — ^like the anarchist who killed the Empress
Elizabeth of Austro-Hungary — they are illegitimate. The assassins are
living out some infantile conflict. The assassinations they perform are su-
preme efforts at self-justification, to make up for the miseries of thwarted
youth.

No one commits suicide, says Dr. Stekel in a famous essay, unless he
has a tendency to kill some other person. Conversely, no one commits
murder unless he has a tendency to suicide also. Most assassins are des-
perate enough to perform the act of murder because they are disap-
pointed in life; they are candidates for suicide and thus do not mind
risking their own lives to kill someone else. In fact, their tendency to
murder may arise from a desire to make a spectacular exit from life;
they say: ‘T shall die, but before doing so I will take another with me.’^

Back of most political assassinations, according to this theory, is a
history of conspiracy. Secret terrorist groups always deal in the attentat.
The psychological basis of conspiracy is dislike of being an average man;
the conspirator and potential murderer is contemptuous of the organized
majority ; he takes fascinated delight in being the member of a repressed
minority with a political grievance, real or imaginary. Most men are
born with a sense of a great historical mission. All assassins are moti-
vated by a compelling desire to become prominent.^

^And note Mussolini’s remark to Ludwig: “Every anarchist is a dictator who
missed fire.”

JUGOSLAVIA AFTER ALEXANDER 461

Very often the assassin kills a statesman as a father-image. He blames
his father for his precarious and ill-nurtured position in life (almost all
assassins are poor) ; the prominent person he slays is, psychically, his
father, whom he holds responsible for his fate; the prominent person
may be first admired as a father-substitute, then hated, finally killed.
Or, Dr. Stekel proceeds, the assassin may lot^e his father-substitute
enough to kill him; the bipolar nature of love and hate is obvious.
Brutus, for instance, may have killed Caesar because, his spiritual son,
he wanted to be closest to Caesar’s heart, and saw himself displaced by
Mark Antony. He murdered Caesar not because he hated him but out
of jealousy.

A psychic injury such as doubt of the facts of paternity or any one
of the innumerable trauma that may occur in childhood are permanent
in a neurotic personality. They form a suppressed nucleus of eternal
discontent with life. In extreme cases, says Dr. Stekel, they may cause
murder. **The murdered king is in reality atoning for something in the
hidden life of the assassin.” An attentat is a displacement of a small per-
sonal conflict into the life of nations; the assassin is transposing the
source of his unhappiness into the horizon of world affairs. Perhaps
Booth was beaten by a drunken father. So— possibly— Lincoln died.
Perhaps Princip was doubtful of his mother’s virtue. So the World War
came.

Jugoslavia — Hot on the Griddle

The kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was, Hampden Jack-
son points out,^ the product of “an unnatural union of motives.” Presi-
dent Wilson, applying the doctrine of self-determination, wished to lib-
erate and unite the South Slav peoples, excluding Bulgaria. Clemenceau
and his realistic associates wished to set up a buffer state which would
serve two purposes : (i ) remove territory from the old Austro-Hungary,
and thus weaken the new Austria and the new Hungary, and (2) keep
Italy off the Dalmatian coast, which, as we know, had been promised
her by the secret treaty by which she was bribed to enter the war.

The word Jugoslavia means “south”) may connote to many

Americans a vague Balkan something-or-other of no particular beam
or bulk. But in fact Jugoslavia is one of the most important and power-
ful countries in Europe; it stretches from the plains of Hungary almost
to the uiEgean, and from the gateway of Austria to the bottle-neck of the
® In his admirable The Past-War Worlds p, 59.

INSIDE EUROPE

462

Adriatic. Its population is I3,5Cmd,ooo, and it covers an area twice as big
as New York State; the people are mostly peasants or mountain folk;
rawboned, poor, hard-lipped, superb fighters, primitive.

Jugoslavia’s chief domestic issue should have been to consolidate itself
politically and sell its grain; like Rumania, it lives largely on the land.
But almost from the beginning it was torn by domestic quarrels and
split by internal fissures. The dominant political note since the war has
been the angry quarrel between Serbs and Croats. Alexander’s dictator-
ship was made necessary, fundamentally, by the absolute failure of Serb-
Croat relations during the ten years 1919-1929 of the parliamentary
regime.

The Serbs are Balkan folk centering in Belgrade, Greek Orthodox in
religion, semi-Turkish in culture, and militant in spirit. The Croats,
centering in Zagreb, lived for centuries in the orbit of Vienna, and
represented a more European culture and tradition; they are Roman
Catholic. The Serbs fought with the Allies during the war, the Croats
(against their will, it is true) with the Central Powers. The Croats
number 3,300,000 people, almost thirty per cent of the realm. Allied
to them have been their cousins to the north, the Slovenes. The Croats
use the Latin alphabet, the Serbs the old Cyrillic script.

After the war the country was given a handsome new democratic
constitution and the discordant parts of the kingdom were expected to
live happily ever after. Of course they didn’t. The ruling Serbs, led by
Alexander, made some tactical mistakes; for instance so convinced
was the King of the intractability of the Croats that for a period of ten
years he never set foot in Zagreb, although it was the second capital of
his realm; which is as if the King of England refused ever to visit
Scotland. The Croats, convinced that they were being treated like sec-
ond-class citizens, grew more and more intransigent; passion finally
exploded in the massacre in the Skupt china (parliament) when the Croat
leader, Raditch, was killed.

The psychological core of the quarrel was probably resentment by the
Serbs at their inferiority to Zagreb; therefore they punished Zagreb.
The Serbs had a subconscious hatred of ‘'European” civilization, which
had been personified to them by German and Austrian invaders. And
the Croats, though Slav by race and language, were thoroughly Teu-
tonized. They were richer than the Serbs, with most of the industry of
the kingdom. No wonder the Serbs, who had stood the whole brunt of
the war, and whose country had been terribly devastated, were jealous.

JUGOSLAVIA AFTER ALEXANDER 463

The Croats called the Serbs ‘‘Mexicans’^ and “bandits/’ The Serbs
called the Croats lazy trouble-makers. The Croats said they would prefer
even the old monarchy to the tyranny of Alexander's dictatorship in
Belgrade. The Serbs scofifingly quoted the old proverb that if there were
only three Croats left alive, there would be four Croat political parties.
The Croats martyrized Raditch, their murdered leader. The Serbs re-
plied that the Croats had done everything for independence for a thou-
sand years — except fight for it. And the Serbs dragooned the Croats
into submission.

All of this, for which both sides were at fault, was a pity. What Jugo-
slavia needed was forty years of peace. It needed time to develop its
mines and farms and magnificent natural resources. The country is
sketched out; it needs to be built up. Take Belgrade, for instance. The
majority of its shops, in the main streets, are still devoted to the sale
of the most primitive necessities of life, the simplest kind of manufac-
tured goods, like pins, buttons, cotton cloth. Belgrade is blessed as few
cities are with natural beauty, lying high on the confluence of two great
rivers, Danube and Save; but it is like a pretty peasant girl with the
carriage of a queen and the raiment of a dirty beggar.

When Alexander died the Croats did not make the revolution that
many people expected. Reasons: the dissidents were, as the Serbs
charged, soft folk, not given to bloodshed or revolution; they had no
arms; Croat detachments of the army had been carefully scattered in
remote parts of the kingdom; the Serb police, veritable myrmidons, w^ere
watchful ; above all no help came from Italy. And in homage to Alex-
ander a political truce began.

Revolution in the Balkans — Why Not?

The question is often asked why the miserable Danube and Balkan
folk do not rise from their poverty and squalor and make a thorough-
going social revolution. There are several reasons, aside from the obvi-
ous difficulty of proletarian revolt in a country ruled by police power.

1. The basic passion of most Balkan folk is nationalism. Their primi-
tive and turbulent energies are directed to the preservation of their own
political minority or country, rather than social revolution ; nationalism
is the pipe through which their energies are discharged.

2. Danubia is at least three-fifths agrarian, and the majority of peas-
ants, though poor, own their own land. The industrial proletariat is
scanty. A middle class has grown up only in the last two generations,

INSIDE EUROPE

464

and is still very new and shaky; in Jugoslavia, for instance, as in
Hungary, there is scarcely any middle class at all. The extreme primi-
tiveness of Balkan social structures makes revolutionary propaganda
difficult.

3. Social democracy, long a considerable force, has produced in most
of these countries a considerable paternalism; there is a proverb in
Hungary, for instance, that the state takes care of you from birth till
you are fifteen, and then from sixty until you die. As long as the people
get assistance from the state, in however rudimentary a form, revolt
is unlikely.

4. A White Terror of terrible ferocity followed the only two attempts
to introduce communism to the Danube, those of Bela Kun in Hungary
and Stambolisky in Bulgaria. To justify their mass murders, the Whites
kept alive the legend of communist barbarity and secret strength. Having
tasted blood, the Whites would not mind tasting more. Therefore any
outcropping of communism is mercilessly crushed.

5. Hunger, Prolonged misery and distress, such as have afflicted the
people of Danubia, are likely, it seems, to produce not revolt but apathy
and inertia, and a torpor of almost pathological quality. People do not
make revolutions when hungry — at first — simply because hunger makes
them weak.

Black Hand and White

General Peter Zivkovitch was a young man in 1903, a junior lieu-
tenant in the royal guard. Mark that date. The year 1903 was the one
in which, as mentioned above. King Alexander Obrenovitch and his
wife Draga were murdered by officers who subsequently put Peter
Karageorgeovitch on the throne. The officer whose special job it was
to force open the palace gates was ever after nicknamed by his intimates
*Teter the Door.” His name was, and is, Peter Zivkovitch.

Zivkovitch, the son of a blacksmith, was for many years a dominant
factor in Jugoslav military life. For a long time he received only normal
promotions, but his influence behind the scenes, as a survivor of the
original murder gang, was great. In 1921, King Alexander (Kara-
georgeovitch) appointed him commander of the palace guard, a sort of
army within an army, eighteen thousand strong, which garrisons Bel-
grade. It seemed strange to some that an accessory to the murder of one
king should be charged with the security of another. In 1929, when
the King abolished democracy, he appointed Zivkovitch prime minister.

JUGOSLAVIA AFTER ALEXANDER 46$

which job the general held till 1932. Subsequently he was minister
of war.

After the 1903 murder the leading conspirator-officers formed the
nucleus of a secret society, the Black Hand, officially called Ujedinjcnje
Hi Smrt, which means Society of Union or Death. Its adventures in
patriotic murder and terrorism caused, among other things, the Great
War, since Princip, the Sarajevo assassin, was schooled by Black Hand
men. In Sarajevo to-day there is, incidentally, a public monument to
Princip, who is a national hero to the Serbs, even though he indirectly
cost the loss of twenty million lives.

Zivkovitch was a prominent Black Hander for sound political rea-
sons. The Black Hand stood for greater Serbia ; it sought to keep Serb
chauvinism, no cool thing anyway, at fever heat; it w^as the military
clique behind the throne. The Black Hand society was truly secret. Mem-
bers knew each other only by number, and no one was sure who was not
a member. The leader was a general staff officer of marvelous ruthless-
ness and fervor, Colonel Dragutin Dimitri jevitch. Had not Dimitri jevitch
founded the Black Hand, it is quite possible that the World War would
have come — ^in a different way.

The Black Hand was broken up during the war. This was because
some of the members were believed to have turned republican. They
did not trust the young Alexander. Zivkovitch, however, gambled on
Alexander, and formed, so far as is known, a sort of counter-movement
to the Black Hand, called — ^without startling originality — ^the White
Hand. The White Hand men were those who depended for their careers
on the young King.

Dimitri jevitch and the out-and-out Black Handers were eliminated by
a conspiracy in which Zivkovitch, possibly with the knowledge of Alex-
ander, played at least the role of winner. In 1917 Serbia seemed doomed.
Wanting as good terms as possible, the Serbs destroyed the archives
linking the Black Hand with the Sarajevo murder. It remained to put
Dimitrijevitch out of the way, and direct witness to the preparations of
the assassination of Franz Ferdinand would be silenced. With four fel-
lows Dimitrijevitch was tried at Salonika, charged with an attempt on
Alexander’s life. The evidence was flimsy, but after a sensational trial
the Black Handers were convicted, and Dimitrijevitch was put to death.

This cleared the field for Zivkovitch. The White Hand took over from
the Black.

INSIDE EUROPE

466

He forgot all about political terrorism and conspiracy, and devoted
himself to the interests of Alexander.

Zivkovitch's influence notably waned after the assassination of Alex-
ander. In 1937 he left politics and was pensioned out of the army.

Croat Crusader

The opposition leader most worth noting is Vladimir Matchek. His
resemblances to Mamu in Rumania are very strong: an idealist, stub-
born, Roman Catholic, a lover of the peasants, incorruptibly honest, nar-
row, old-fashioned in his belief in the natural goodness of people and
that right will prevail in politics, because it is right. He is a lawyer by
profession. He did not, like so many leaders in the Balkans, go into
politics because politics was the only way for the educated to earn a
living. As with most Croats, oppositionism, particularism, is ingrained
in his character.

Matchek in Croatia, like Maniu in Transylvania, is revered by his peo-
ple almost like a messiah. He has suffered imprisonment on trumped-up
charges ; his best friends have been murdered by police spies ; his lieu-
tenants beaten and tortured in a manner unknown in modern Europe
until Hitler took power in Germany. He is a messiah; but a messiah
without much prospect of power. He is defeated by the central illogi-
cality of his position ; he does not want complete separatism for Croatia,
and indeed separatism is a political impossibility; therefore, since he
won’t go the whole way, his opposition is permanent — ^and sterile.

Foreign Affairs — and Affaires

The position taken by Jugoslavia in regard to the present war is of the
greatest possible importance. The army is the sixth largest in Europe,
numbering 184,000 men, with 1,200,000 trained reserves; it is com-
petently advised by the French general staff and armed by French and
formerly by Czechoslovak munition companies, particularly the Skoda
works at Pilsen; moreover, the fighting quality of the men is superb.
The Jugoslav army is probably, man for man, the most formidable
in Europe.

The chief enemies of Jugoslavia, the third country in the Little
Entente, are Hungary and Italy, though relations with Hungary have
considerably improved lately. Jugoslavia took part in sanctions against
Mussolini even though Italy was her best customer : which goes to show
that bad blood counts more in the Balkans than an export surplus.

JUGOSLAVIA AFTER ALEXANDER 467

For a long time Italy had aggressive intentions toward Jugoslavia,
Mussolini coveted Jugoslav territory because the seizure of Dalmatia
would make the Adriatic an Italian lake. Italian interests encouraged
and probably subsidized the less respectable elements of Croat, Slovene,
and Macedonian opposition to the Belgrade Government. Italy made
alliances with Austria and Hungary and sought to make one with Bul-
garia, thus encircling Jugoslavia. But after 1935 Mussolini, with his ener-
gies occupied in Spain, tended to let Jugoslavia alone. In March, 1935,
the new Italian minister to Jugoslavia outdid himself in conciliatory
messages from his government (In contrast, think of 1927, when a
Jugoslav minister to Rome had to w'ait seven months before being
received by Mussolini.) Meantime Jugoslav relations with Bulgaria
have been improving, because the new Bulgarian Government made
a genuine attempt to suppress the Macedonian movement, the chief
source of Bulgar- Jugoslav friction.

Jugoslavia, though a French ally, has had considerable pro-German
feelings. Reasons: (i) Germany is the best potential customer for
Jugoslav — ^like Rumanian — grain; (2) good armies tend, as a rule, to
admire each other, and the Jugoslav general staff deeply respects the
Reichswehr; (3) French loans, for many years the prop of Jugoslav
finance, don’t flow so freely as heretofore; (4) German seizure of
Austria has excluded the possibility of a Habsburg restoration, which
had been Jugoslavia’s chief foreign bugaboo, and also weakened Italy
vis-a-vis the Germans. It put the mighty Reichswehr instead of the
weak Austrian battalions on the Brenner Pass and thus helped solve
Jugoslavia’s most pressing military problem. friends wdth the

enemy of your enemy” is a cardinal principle of Balkan politics. Despite
the recent nibblings toward cordiality, Jugoslavia’s “permanent” enemy
is Italy.

The Germans have courted Jugoslavia hotly for years. Early in
1934 I met an amiable servant of the Wilhelmstrasse in a Belgrade
wagon-lit, who made no bones about the fact that his job was passing
out money to German-language newspapers in the Balkans. General
Goering swooped into Jugoslavia for several visits, and pleased the boy
king with a tremendous toy railway train as a birthday gift. Dr. Stoya-
dinovitch, until recently the Jugoslav premier, was invited to one of
the Goering-Goemboes-Polish hunting parties, and later he saw Hitler
in Berlin.

Qapter XXXII

Balkan Kings

Must every little language have a country all its own?

— ^Jerome Frank

Zog — Once of Albania

*pHIS picturesque former monarch, who was ruler of the smallest
* country in Europe, Albania, from 1928 to 1939, is now an exile.
The Italians invaded and occupied his unhappy country during the
Good Friday week-end, thus providing Mussolini with his chief for-
eign adventure since Spain, and his only conquest since Ethiopia.
King Zog and his queen were forced to flee after a three day ‘Var^'
together with their infant child who had just been born. They escaped,
after arduous trials, to Greece.

"'Zog’’ is the indefinite, Zogu the definite form of his name, which in
Albania, a chaotically difficult language of Illyrian origin, means BIRD.
Zog is often called "The Bird” or "The Big Bird.” He is a Moslem by
religion, and he was born of distinguished parents, his father having
been hereditary chieftain of the powerful Mati tribe, in upper Albania.
He was educated in Constantinople and speaks Turkish and a little
dilapidated German as well as Albanian. In Zog’s homeland, remote and
barbarous, law is informally administered by what is known as the blood
feud. If your kill a man, his relatives kill you, and so on for a couple of
generations. There are supposed to be about six hundred blood feuds
out against King Zog.

He was destined to a political life. His uncle was Essad Pasha, who
created Albanian independence. Zog returned to Albania after his Turkish
education in 1912 and took part in the guerrilla fighting of the Balkan
wars. Many pleasant legends grew up about him : they tell you in Albania
how at first he was so inexperienced that he could not properly tie the
straps of his opanji, native shoes ; that once he killed seven horses riding
to his men ; that he took over command of the district by blunt force of
character and courage; that he led a sortie into Montenegro and cut his

468

BALKAN KINGS 469

way in and out of two whole armies ; and so on. There are always such
stories about Balkan princelings. Not impossibly these are true.

Zog fell in love with a girl named Miriana Zougdidi, according to one
of these legends. Her father refused permission for the match. Zog
swore that he would become King of Albania to prove his worth. The
father, still obdurate, chased a gang of Zog’s kidnapers who abducted
the girl, and killed her with his own dagger to keep her from falling
into Zog's hands. He then sent the girl’s body to Zog as a sort of wedding
present. Zog swore eternal vengeance, and never to marry. He exter-
minated the father and his whole family — ^and didn’t marry until 1938.
Also, be it noted, he did become King of Albania.

The bloodshed among Albanian politicians in this period, immediately
after the war, was immense. Essad Pasha, Zog’s uncle, was assassinated
in Paris by a compatriot, Aveni Roustemi. This Roustemi was himself
later assassinated in Tirana, Albania’s village capital. Tzena Bey, Zog’s
brother-in-law, was killed in Prague by a student, Alcibiades Bedi. Bedi
was shot and killed in the court-room where he stood trial by colleagues
who thought he might inform on them. There have been two attempts on
Zog’s life, but he escaped each time.

The way to play politics in Albania was to make a revolution. Zog
made several. He was minister of interior in an Albanian government
that was forced out of office and into exile by the Putsch of a radical
priest. Monsignor Fan Noli. Zog lived in Belgrade, Jugoslavia, for a
year, and then made another revolution whereby he ousted Fan Noli
and became president of Albania. This was in 1925. Three years later
Zog promoted himself, with Italian help, to be king.

Zog did very well out of kingship financially. His acknowledged
civil list for the year 1934-1935 was the following:

Compensation to H.M. the King
Rent allowance

Compensation to H.M. the Queen Mother
Salary to Master of Ceremonies
Salaries, Royal household
Traveling expenses
Office supplies, etc.

Salaries of the Inspectorate
Traveling expenses and supplies

300,000 gold francs

20.000 ” ”

88.000 ”

4,752 "

14,900 ”

2.000 ”

2,500 ”

22,282 ”

9.000 ”

463,434 gold francs

which was 2.63 per cent of the total revenue of his realm*

470

INSIDE EUROPE

The cardinal fact of the Albanian situation before Italy took the
little country in 1939 was this: Zog started out as Jugoslavia’s man, and
then sold out to Mussolini.

Both Jugoslavia and Italy were interested in Albania, because it lies
at the bottle-neck of the Adriatic. When Zog was a refugee in Belgrade
the Jugoslavs decided to support him, because they disliked Fan Noli.
From Jugoslavia Zog got not merely moral and political assistance, but
' actually troops. Imagine, then, the horror and anger of Belgrade when,
having put Zog back into power, it saw him immediately turn his coun-
try over to the Italians. Zog’s excuse is that he had to have money to
build up the country and strengthen his position, and that Jugoslavia
could give him none. So he became an Italian puppet.

Very promptly — ^this was in the middle 20’s — ^the Italians imple-
mented their advantage. First came a series of loans whereby an Italian
company, the Society for the Economic Development of Albania,
received exclusive rights to build roads, dredge harbors, and under-
take other public works. An oil concession was given Italy. Italian officers
reorganized the Albanian army. In November, 1926, Mussolini and
Zog signed the first Treaty of Tirana, which virtually made Albania an
Italian protectorate. A year later — ^just in time to stave off a revengeful
Jugoslav Putsch — ^this treaty was strengthened by an outright military
alliance.

Italy then poured millions of lire into Albania. The country became,
in fact, a sort of bottomless marsh swallowing Italian gold. The pace of
this financial debauch had to be retarded when the world economic crisis
hit Italy, but even in 1931 Italy agreed to lend Albania 10,000,000 gold
francs ($2,000,000 gold) per year for ten years, free of interest, “in
order to make the financial position of Albania sound and to facilitate
development of its national economy.’’ In 1934 and later there came still
other loans.

Then, however, developments in Albania began to discourage Italian
enterprise. The Italians threatened to cut off the stream of gold. This
was because Zog, a flirtatious fellow, commenced to be friendly again
with Jugoslavia. Italians — ^the doctors, soldiers, engineers, typographers,
road builders — ^became increasingly unpopular in Albania. Zog quar-
reled with his Italian advisers. He resented his dependence on Italy;
he lamented the bargain he had made. For a time the Italians had to
continue to pay him, because their position in the country rested on

BALKAN KINGS

471

his person. Then Mussolini decided to terminate the comedy. Italy in-
vaded the country, Zog fled, and Albania ceased to exist.

Zog is not at all an unpleasant character, despite his former tendency
to flirt. He double-crossed Jugoslavia and sought to double-cross Italy,
and he suffered for it, but his motives were good, viz., thoroughly
consistent with Balkan nationalist ideals. By playing Italy and Jugo-
slavia against one another, he thought he was insuring the one thing
that mattered to him — his country’s independence. He was wrong.
A patriot, he stood for free Albania. The nationalism of Albania does
not whisper even if the country is small — and now extinct.

Boris of Bulgaria

Boris III of Bulgaria, a decent and honorable man, gentle and retiring,
now forty-five, is a doubter, not a man of action. Groping, honest,
theoretical rather than realistic, he likes to believe the best of people-
His personal charm is considerable. He is extremely obliging. The
little story is told in Sofia that he was found in the palace gardens one
morning, engaged in netting butterflies — ^because he w^as receiving
an entomologist for lunch that day.

He and his queen, the Italian Princess Giovanna of Savoy, lead a
quiet life. During the first year after their marriage in October, 1930, they
went out not at all, because Boris wanted his bride to feel at home in
Bulgaria and learn a little Bulgarian before exposing herself to the
rigors of Sofia society. Even now they seldom entertain or go to diplo-
matic functions, first because the frugality of Bulgarian character tends
to discourage such displays, second because the King — ^incredible as this
may seem — feels that he might not be able to repay the hospitality in
kind. He is not so indigent that he cannot afford a few dozen cases of
champagne, but the country is so threadbare-poor that he thinks any
ostentatious display of luxury to be bad taste.

Boris knows an astounding number of his subjects by name and face,
literally thousands, from peasant farmers in the valley of roses near
Plovdiv to civil servants in government ministries. He is fond of me-
chanics, and his only hobby is locomotive-driving. Once he jumped into
the sea off Varna and rescued a villager from drowning. Frequently
he himself pushes the perambulator containing his baby daughter through
the modest palace gardens. After his marriage, the story goes, he would
meet old friends on the streets and introduce the Queen by saying simply,
*‘Meet my wife.’’

472 INSIDE EUROPE

Boris is the worst-dressed king in Europe. He insists on wearing
Sofia-made clothes. And Sofia is not exactly Savile Row. He drinks little
alcohol. He knows five European languages, and in bed each morning
he reads newspapers in them all: French, German, Bulgarian, Italian,
English. His study is lined with photographs of his multitudinous
cousins, uncles, aunts, and other relatives scattered through the reigning
houses of Europe. All his instincts, his associations, are with the past.

Boris gets about $60,000 per year. This is not much for a king, but
the Bulgarian government pays most of his expenses. He has little of
Zog’s interest in money and nothing of the financial capacity of the late
Alexander of Jugoslavia. Queen Giovanna received a dowry of 25,000,-
000 lire from her father, the King of Italy, on the occasion of her
marriage, and the income from it should make her as rich as Boris.
In addition she gets an allowance of 950,000 leva, about $10,200, a
year from the Bulgarian state. Boris should become very rich when his
father, ex-King Ferdinand, “the Old Fox,’’ dies.

King Carol of Rumania got the fright of his life when he and Boris
met at the Danube town of Roustchuk in 1934; Boris greeted him,
persuaded him to descend from his car, and walked with him arm in
arm down the streets. Carol would never have dreamed of so exposing
himself in any Rumanian town. He was alarmed at first by his un-
wonted proximity to the common herd, then impressed at the friendly
way the crowd greeted Boris. Exactly the same thing happened when
the late King Alexander of Jugoslavia visited the Bulgarian monarch.
Boris drove him to Plovdiv to see the roses ; they went alone, without
even informing the Mayor of Plovdiv that they were coming. There
were plenty of Macedonians in the crowd, and Alexander didn’t like it
at all, but Boris insisted on walking with him through the streets. The
fact that he was in Boris’ company kept him safe.

In Bulgaria when villagers go on a journey they often carry their
shoes in their hands to save wear .and tear on the leather. Thus one
knows that Bulgaria is a frugal country. Among the six million inhab-
itants of Bulgaria, fewer than six thousand have been divorced; thus
one knows its folk are morally conventional. The Bulgars, poor, clean,
intensely honest, are probably the best people in the Balkans.

Look at some Bulgarian salaries. A cabinet minister gets $200 per
month, a tremendous sum for the country. The Rector of Sofia Univer-*

BALKAN KINGS 473

sity gets $68, and an ordinary professor $80. Judges range from $30 to
$40 a month; generals get $fc, policemen $13.75, archbishops $100,
high school teachers $35, a locomotive driver $15. And there is no
baksheesh — ^bribery — in Bulgaria.

To Bulgaria, during the worst of the economic crisis in the early
thirties, went the distressing honor of owning the most tragically ex-
treme statistics in Europe. For instance, the weight of Bulgarian exports,
in 193^? increased by eighty per cent over the previous year — ^but their
value decreased by three per cent. In igsi, again, the volume of exports
went up by forty per cent— and the value fell again— by four per cent.

The depression, by emphasizing economic discontent, aggravated po-
litical unrest. Boris is a pleasant man, but he is in a dangerous predica-
ment. His timidity, his lack of decision, got him into a pretty mess, and
for one extensive period during 1934 he did not dare to leave his palace.
The people may have liked him — ^but certain powerful officers in the
army didn’t. Three men who are real forces in the political life of Bul-
garia, Professor Tzankov, Colonel Kimon Gheorgiev, and Colonel
Damien Veltchev, are his enemies.

Tzankov is the reactionary who crushed the peasant government of
Stambolisky in 1923. He was prime minister then till 1926. During the
first part of his rule a White Terror, for which he was partly responsible,
ruled the land. Tzankov built up a powerful Fascist movement, and is
bidding for power again.

Gheorgiev is the blunt, one-eyed colonel of reserve who performed
the coup d'etat of May 19, 1934, when the King was forced to abolish
parliament and consent to the establishment of a dictatorial regime. The
Gheorgiev government performed useful service, however, in bettering
Bulgaria’s relations with Jugoslavia. This it did by outlawing one fac-
tion of the Macedonian movement and expelling Ivan Mihailov, the
chief of the Macedonians, from the country.

Gheorgiev was forced from office on January 22, 1935, when officers
of the Military League, royalist in sympathy, accused him of repub-
licanism and a plot to dethrone the King. The government that suc-
ceeded Gheorgiev was the King’s government, made by his authority;
this was dangerous, because Boris could be accused of taking an active
partisan role in politics.

The third man of importance is an overt republican, Colonel Damien
Veltchev. He was the man behind Gheorgiev, who did little but take
his orders. Veltchev was for many years the commandant of the cadet

4.74 INSIDE EUROPE

school in Sofia, and thus most of the younger officv^rs of the army
are “his’' men. He is a typical Balkan adventurer: able, unscrupulous,
a fanatic nationalist. Veltchev, whose insurrectionary activity goes back
a long way, organized the 1923 Putsch which murdered Stambolisky
and put Tzankov into power. In 1936 Veltchev was arrested and
interned.

Bulgaria, a loser in the war — the unfortunate little country always
picks the wrong side in wars — ^was mercilessly chopped asunder, like
Hungary, by the peace treaties. Rumania got the Dobrudja; Turkey
^ot Thrace; Greece got part of Thrace and part of Macedonia; Jugo-
slavia got the rest of Macedonia.

The Bulgarians, decent folk, and too small and too far away to create
nuch international noise, have not been so umbrageous as the Hun-
^rians in demanding their territory back. But the country is officially
me of the “revisionist" powers, and, as such, has tended to associate
tself with Italy and Germany.

Early in 1934 the countries surrounding Bulgaria decided to check
his tendency, and so formed the Balkan Entente. The participants were
Rumania, Jugoslavia, Greece, Turkey; and the diplomat who did most
:)f the negotiating was the Rumanian foreign minister, Titulescu. Just
IS Hungary was encircled by the Little Entente, Bulgaria is encircled by
he Balkan Entente.

It is bad luck for small and sinned-against Bulgaria; the only way
mt seems to be individual rapprochement with Jugoslavia.

Can a king be a dictator? Alexander of Jugoslavia is the only one
vho tried it: and look what happened. Indeed, with Boris in mind, it
>eems a safe generalization that royalty and dictatorship do not lie well
ogether. There are many reasons. This is an age of bourgeois or pro-
etarian adventurers. Hitlers and Mussolinis, the age of the strong man
vith a fist. Kings have not enough freedom of education to be good
iictators. They are inveterately international, and thus cut across the
ieep exclusive nationality of men like Pilsudski or Kamal Ataturk.
They have no real contact with the common man. And modern science,
nodem economics, have destroyed the will of the masses to believe
n kings as kings.

BALKAN KINGS

475

Greece and Metaxas

In November, 1935, George, King of the Hellenes, regained the throne
of Greece. This amiable and complex young man, long an exile in
Brown’s Hotel, Dover Street, London, had reigned for a brief period
in 1922, in succession to his father, Constantine. Greek politics for
twenty years has been an angry quarrel between royalists and republi-
cans. Venizelos, the great republican leader, an old and tired man,
was forced to flee the countrj when his final attempt at a rising was
crushed in March, 1935, and shortly afterward he died in Paris. Sub-
sequently a royalist general, Kondylis, long a bad actor in Greek politics,
prepared the way for a monarchical coup d'etat.

George, a cautious monarch, who well remembers the checkered history
of his family on the throne — ^his father, for instance, had to flee the
country twice — ^was not passionately eager to return. Very different
from his ex-brother-in-law, Carol (George and his Rumanian wife
Elizabeth have been divorced), he did not yearn to regain the crown,
for the simple reason that he didn’t want subsequently to be kicked
out again. George told his adherents that he would not return until an
honest — ^well, fairly honest — ^plebiscite demanded him. It did.

In August, 1936, Greece became a military dictatorship, with George’s
consent, under a royalist general with a long record of conspiracy.
General Metaxas. A general election was held, according to the newly
returned King’s pledges; it resulted in a virtual draw between the
monarchists and republicans, with a communist bloc of 15 deputies
holding the balance of power. Thereafter parliamentary government
became even more difficult than it had ordinarily been. On the pretext
that the communists were planning a general strike, General Metaxas
suddenly declared martial law and set out to rule the country by decree.

Metaxas was born on Ithaca, the island of Ulysses, in 1871. He is
thus the oldest of the dictators. He was educated in Berlin — note well —
and from 1890 was an army officer. During the Balkan wars he was
director of operations on the general staff. At about this time his
loyalty to the Constantine dynasty began to assert itself; from 1917
he became an inveterate enemy of the Venizelists. Once he was con-
demned to death; several times he was exiled; he always came back.
People called him the "‘Little Moltke.” In 1934 he started a party of
his own. Fascist-monarchist, which was severely defeated in the polls.

476 INSIDE EUROPE

Then came the unsuccessful Venizelist Putsch of 1935 which he helped
to put down.

He is quite frank about his aims. 'Tarliamentary democracy is ended
in Greece forever,” he said in September, 1936. His regime is seemingly
an overt despotism, and King George has acted like a puppet in his
hands.

Greece lies outside the grande ligne of European politics, despite the
Balkan Entente, and although the British pledged themselves to guar-
antee Greek independence early in 1939. Roughly speaking, the Greek
royalists are pro-ally and pro-status quo ; the republicans are revisionist
and pro-Italian. Because George might be supposed to be anti-Mussolini,
the British foreign office looked with cautious favor on his return, pro-
vided it was managed without a civil war. George is, of course, a
cousin of Princess Marina, the wife of the Duke of Kent, and is thus
associated with the House of Windsor. Britain would find Greek naval
bases convenient in the event of war with Italy. For some time there
was talk that the Duke of Kent, instead of George, might become
Greek king.

George’s restoration was popular among the other royalties of the
region. There is a fourth internationale in the world, as my friend M. W.
Fodor has pointed out. Kings like more kings.

Chapter XXXIll

The Turkish Colossus^

T he blond, blue-eyed combination of patriot and psychopath who is
dictator of Turkey has changed his name seven times. First he was
simply Mustafa, so called by his parents in Salonika, At school he was
given the name Mustafa Kemal to distinguish him from other little
Mustafas, and because a teacher admired his skill in mathematics;
^‘KemaT' in Turkish means '‘perfection.’" After the Dardanelles cam-
paign, he became Mustafa Kemal Pasha, “pasha” being a military title
equivalent to general. After he crushed the Greeks in 1921 he assumed
the name Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha ; “ghazi” means “destroyer of
infidels,” an odd sobriquet for Kemal, inasmuch as he was the greatest
infidel in Turkish history. Then years later he became Ghazi Mustafa
Kemal when he abolished military titles. In 1934 he ordered every Turk
to assume a patronymic in the Western fashion and chose for himself
“Ataturk,” which means “Father of Turks.” So he was simply Kemal
Ataturk. Finally he modified this to the Turkish form of the Arabic,
to become KIamal Ataturk.

His own is by no means the only name he changed. When I went to
Constantinople recently after an absence of several years I was astounded
at the metamorphosis in names placarded on the streets. Kamal western-
ized the Turkish alphabet — quite completely ! Modern Turkish is strictly
a phonetic tongue. These were some of the compulsory renderings of
names which greeted me :

Kahve

Tabldot

Amerikan Ekspres Ko, Ink.
Jorj

Moris Sovaliye
La Jones
Dizl Enjn
Star Su Sop

instead of Coffee

” Table d’Hote
” American Express Co., Inc.
” George
” Maurice Chevalier
” La Jeunesse (a shop)

” Diesel Engine
” Star Shoe Shop

1 Mustafa Kemal Ataturk died after a long illness in November, 1938. I am
printing this sketch of his career and character as I wrote it in 1935, without
alteration.

477

INSIDE EUROPE

478

Vagonli-Kook
Enstitu do Bote
Or Duvr

Foks Film Korporeysen
Waytaus

Lozan Palas Otel

instead oj Wagon-Lit-Cook

’’ Institute de Beaute
Hors-d’Oeuvre
” Fox Film Corporation

” White House (a shop)

’’ Lausanne Palace Hotel

Kamal Ataturk, who strides the Turkish landscape like a colossus —
significantly a bronze statue of him in a dinner-jacket (with the trousers
cuffed) commands the Golden Horn — ^is'in the position of a man with
no more worlds to conquer. His reforms have been so drastic and so
comprehensive that in cultural and social fields at least there is very
little left to do. He abolished the fez, turned the mosques into granaries.
Latinized the language. He ended polygamy, installed new legal codes,
and experimented with a (paying) casino in the sultan's palace. He
compulsorily disinfected all the buildings in Istanbul, adopted the Gre-
gorian calendar and metric system, and took the first census in Turkish
history. He cut political holidays down to three, demanded physical ex-
amination of those about to marry, and built a new capital, Ankara, in
the Anatolian highlands, replacing proud Constantinople. He limited
most business activity to Turkish nationals and Turkish firms, abolished
books of magic, and gave every Turk a new last name. He emancipated
the women (more or less), tossed the priests into the discard, and super-
intended the writing of a new history of the world proving that Turkey
is the source of all civilization.

Kamal Ataturk, a somewhat Bacchic character, the full record of
whose personal life makes you blink, is the dictator-type carried to its
ultimate extreme, the embodiment of totalitarian rule by character. This
man, in personality and accomplishments, resembles no one so much as
Peter the Great, who also westernized his country at frightful cost.
Kamal Ataturk is the roughneck of dictators. Beside him. Hitler is a
milksop, Mussolini a perfumed dandy, and Goemboes a creature of the
drawing-room. At one of his own receptions Kamal, slightly exhilarated,
publicly slapped the Egyptian minister when he observed the hapless
diplomat wearing the forbidden fez.

No man has ever betrayed more masters, and always from motives of
his own view of patriotism. In 1918, a staff officer, he was chosen to
accompany Vahydu’d-Din, the Crown Prince, to Berlin, and there assist
him in consultations with Hindenburg, Ludendorff , and the German high

THE TURKISH COLOSSUS

479

command Three years later Kamal booted him, as Sultan Mehmed VI,
out of Turkey.

After the Armistice Kamal was sent by the authorities as inspector-
general of the eastern vilayets to investigate a nationalist insurrection
in Kurdistan. He was ordered to find and quell these rebels. He found
them all right. But instead of crushing the movement he took charge of
it! Within two years he brought victory in all of Turkey to the very
organization his superiors had sent him to suppress.

In 1926, following a not very professional attempt on his life, he
hanged what amounted to the entire leadership of the opposition. Among
those he allowed to be sentenced to death and executed were Colonel
Arif, who had been his comrade-at-arms in the Greek campaign, and
Djavid Bey, the best financial mind in Turkey. Kamal had a champagne
party in his lonely farm-house at Chankaya, near Ankara, to celebrate
the occasion, and invited all the diplomats. Returning home at dawn,
they saw the corpses hanging in the town square.

(In 1930 Kamal decided that totalitarian rule to the extremity which
he carried it was a bore, and, uniquely among dictators, he proceeded
to create an opposition, naming various men to be its leaders. Somewhat
timidly, they accepted. Kamal wanted to see if Western democratic
methods would work; he wanted an opposition bench to argue with in
parliament. The system didn’t work. The Turks, with the memory of
1926 in mind, didn’t seem to understand. . . .)

His psychological history is of surpassing interest. Two things have
dominated the secret springs of his life, his mother and illness. For his
mother he had a typical bipolar love-hate obsession. During the early
years he was continually fetching her to live with him, then flinging off
alone again. Finally he brought her to the Chankaya farm-house and she
died there. She was the only woman he was ever faithful to. It is possible
that his merciless campaign against the Greeks was subconsciously moti-
vated by his mother’s experiences in a refugee camp in Salonika during
the Balkan wars. Kamal popped across the iEgean (he had been fight-
ing in Tripoli against the Italians) to see her, and found her a prisoner
of the Greeks in indescribable circumstances of suffering.

In 1917 Kamal took time off from the war to visit Carlsbad for a
cure. A famous Viennese professor, Dr. Zuckerkandl, looked him over
and told him that if he did not stop drinking he would die in a year. The
illness was troublesome. Kamal returned to the front (he had just been
the most important Turkish officer in beating back the British at the

INSIDE EUROPE

480

Dardanelles) for service in Syria and to his well-known habits. His
health remained, and has remained, about the same. The dear old Vien-
nese professor, however, died two years after prophesying Kamal’s col-
lapse and demise.

A favorite theory is that KamaFs extraordinary bursts of reformist
energy are due to chronic pain. The familiar and excruciating twinges
return, and lo! the dictator abolishes the Turkish alphabet or decrees
the formation of a dozen new investigating commissions ; if true, this
is an interesting example of what the psychiatrists call “displacement.’’
Kamal punishes someone else for his own early sins, purifies a nation
as a surrogate for purification of his own painful blood.

Elamal was born in 1881, the son (like Hitler) of a minor customs
official. The father, Ali Risa, was nothing more than a petty and narrow
bureaucrat, but the mother, named Zubeida, was, like the mothers of
Pilsudski, Mussolini, and Masaryk, a woman far above the normal of her
station. She wanted her son to get an education and become a priest —
exactly like Stalin’s mother, who sent the future dictator of all the Rus-
sias to a theological school in Tiflis. It is clear to the point of triteness
that most of the great men of the world had remarkable mothers, and
that the development of their sons’ CEdipus complex was of paramount
importance in their characters and careers. Kamal’s mother, not an un-
important point, married again after her first husband’s death, and young
Mustafa bitterly hated his stepfather, an interloper in the home.

Ali Risa, Kamal’s father, was apparently of Albanian origin. Zubeida,
the mother, was the daughter of a Turkish peasant whose wife was
Macedonian. Kamal is thus far from being purely Turkish. As great an
authority as To3mbee {Great Contemporaries, p. 291) suggests that Jew-
ish blood may have been in the family. Salonika has, of course, been a
citadel of Jews since the Diaspora; many, called “Ddnme,” were converts
to Islam. But Kamal’s irrefragable blondness and his cold blue eyes
would seem to preclude more than a hint of Jewish — or for that matter
Turkish — ^ancestry.

Kamal’s early life was that of a rebel and above all of a hater. He
wrote revolutionary pamphlets and even poems. He was sentenced to
jail in Constantinople, but his skill as an officer made him valuable, and
he was released. Although a “Young Turk,” his position was tliat of a
suppressed oppositionist; he detested the Yoimg Turk triumvirs, Talaat,
Enver, and Djemal, a feeling which they reciprocated. But his reputation

THE TURKISH COLOSSUS 481

as a soldier was invincible, after service on the most remote, dangerous
and hopeless fronts, and the way to his career was open.

That career is without parallel in modern times. Kamal engineered
the congresses of Erzerum and Sivas and organized the nationalist
movement, leading it to victory. Other people have created nations.
K^mal’s job was harder. He took a nation that was centuries deep in
rot, pulled it to its feet, wiped its face, reclothed it, transformed it, made
it work. In 1919 Turkey was so crushed and broken that it would have
welcomed renunciation of sovereignty and a British mandate. In 1922
Turkey was the one enemy state so strong that it practically dictated its
own peace terms.

In those three years Kamal (i) drove out the Sultan, (2) abolished
the caliphate, (3) fought and won the war against the Greeks and drove
them into the sea, (4) bluffed Great Britain to a standstill at Chanak,
(5) negotiated, through Ismet Pasha, the Treaty of Lausanne, which
ended the regime of capitulations (foreign judicial rights) in Turkey
and established the new frontiers on a basis that the wildest Turkish
nationalist could not have dreamed possible, (6) wrote a republican
constitution and created a parliament in his new impregnable capital,
(7) became Turkey’s first — ^and only — ^president.

Kamal alone, it may be said, does not deserve credit for all this. The
general program of westernization was planned by the Young Turks
and he simply appropriated it. The Greeks w^ere destroyed by the duplic-
ity of Lloyd George and the treason of the allies, also by their own in-
capacity, not by Kamal’s armies. Sultan and caliph were doomed in any
case, and it is no tribute to Kamal that he kicked them out. The Treaty
of Lausanne was won not by Ismet Pasha, but because of jealous squab-
bles between the Western powers. And so on.

Kamal lives these days in Chankaya, a complete recluse. His model
farm is his avocation ; a true megalomaniac, he designed the water res-
ervoir in the shape of the Sea of Marmora ! He married a woman named
Latife Hanum in 1923, but divorced her a few years later; now he lives
alone. He is the most inaccessible public character in Europe, King
George V himself would not have been more difficult to interview. Unlike
all other dictators, he keeps from the foreground ; the Turkish papers
do not mention his name half a dozen times a month. He has a group of
soldier underlings and cronies with whom he plays poker. Rarely, he
gambles at cards with foreign diplomats; he usually wins, then insists
on teturning his winnings. He still likes to drink.

INSIDE EUROPE

482

The Turkish dictator differs from almost all others in that he had no
socialist period in youth and even in maturity betrays not the faintest
interest in socio-economic stresses. His only policy was Turkey for the
Turks. He is certainly a revolutionary, but as far as economics is con-
cerned he might be President of Switzerland. The theory that all na-
tionalist dictators must bear to extreme Right or extreme Left breaks
down on Kamal Ataturk, as it did on Pilsudski,

The two foreign powers that Kamal is most interested in are (except
Great Britain, which he hates) the U.S.S.R and Italy. In the bleak year
1932 he set a new peak in picturesque achievement by procuring loans
from both these countries, which are states not given to the export of
credit in the best of years. Kamal plays them, of course, against each
other. Italy wants Turkish support in the eastern Mediterranean, and
Turkey is bound always to be an important factor in Soviet foreign
policy because the Dardanelles comprise Russia’s only outlet to warm
seas. Kamal disliked the Abyssinian adventure. Therefore his policy
took on a stronger Russian tinge. For some years the Soviet Union and
Turkey were close allies at Geneva, and Dr. Tewfik Aras, the Turk
foreign minister (who, incidentally, was Kamal’s personal physician in
Salonika many years ago), was generally recognized to be Litvinov’s
hand inside a Turkish glove. Meantime, Kamal began to refortify the
Dardanelles. In June, 1936, a conference of the European powers at
Montreux gave him what he didn’t particularly need — ^permission.

General Ismet Indnii

This fifty-nine year old general, for years known as Ismet Pasha, was
for more than a decade Kamal’s prime minister, and when the great
Kamal died in 1938 he succeeded him, as was fitting, in the presidency
of the republic. Ismet had to change his name to Inonii some years ago
when his master decreed that all Turks must have last names. He took
his from the town in Asia Minor where, in 1921, his hard-bitten army
crushed the Greeks and drove them into the sea.

Ismet, about whom comparatively little is known, holds a key position
in world affairs. He is short, graceful, dark-eyed, and very deaf ; he
looks less a soldier than a diplomat. And he is, indeed, one of the best
diplomats of modern times. It was he who negotiated the Lausanne set-
tlement. Ismet was born in Smyrna in 1880, His father was an official.
As Kamal’s right hand man for many years, he has had a comprehensive

THE TURKISH COLOSSUS 483

training in the hardest kind of political work. Kamal taught him to play
poker. But he did not acquire Kamal’s other vices.

In the autumn of 1939 Ismet had to make a tremendous decision —
whether to sign up with the British or the Russians. He chose the
British, but he very carefully left himself loopholes and reservations^
Turkey is not obliged to fight against Russia.

Chapter XXXIV

Poland and the Baltic States

THE theory that nationalism is the most powerful of politico-eco-
■ nomic forces and that nationalism is best represented politically by
the power of personality is well expressed by the case of Poland. The
Polish nation— destroyed and partitioned by the Germans and Russians
in 1939 — ^was created by two factors, nationalism and Pilsudski. The
dictator, Pilsudski, died in 1935, but the fabric of Polish Government,
as long as it survived, was based on his living character and idiosyn-
crasies.

On August 6, 1914, Josef Pilsudski, a Polish patriot and revolution-
ary, went to war against Russia with an army of — ^three hundred men.
This was the celebrated Kadrowka (literally “cadre’’), and with it Pil-
sudski crossed the frontier and invaded the giant body of Russia. The
three hundred men grew into a brigade and the brigade into three bri-
gades. Eventually the Kadrowka became the Polish Legion, fourteen
thousand strong, a revolutionary army for the deliverance of Poland
from the enemies who were ruling it. But until well into the middle of
the war, most people — even Poles — ^thought that Pilsudski was a quixotic
lunatic.

In 1916 the Germans captured Warsaw. They offered to permit the
Polish Legion to continue operations against the Russians as an auxiliary
force, but Pilsudski held out unqualifiedly for Polish independence, and
he was incarcerated in prison at Magdeburg. But first he had time to
transform the Legion into a secret underground organization, the
P.O.W. {Polska Organhacja Wojskowa) , to carry on its work. In 1918
the Central Powers cracked up; Pilsudski returned in triumph to War-
saw to become head of the Polish state; and the Legions and the P.O.W.
were its first armed force.

Now the points to be made are that the Legions were absolutely the
single-handed creation of Pilsudski and that until collapse came in 1939,
twenty-five years later, Poland was still the instrument of his creation.
The Legionnaires ruled Poland. A clique of the marshal’s officers,
fanatically devoted to him in life, reverent of his memory after the

484

POLAND AND THE BALTIC STATES 48^

gruff old walrus died, dominated comprehensively almost every aspect
of Polish life.

Let us list the names that counted. They are difficult names, but each
man was important.

General Thaddeus ICasprzycki was the minister of war. What had he
been in the old days ? Field chief of Pilsudski’s first three hundred men.

General Jan Sosnkowski, commander of an army division, was the
No. 2 military man in the country. What had he been to Pilsudski? Chief
of staff of the Legion.

General Eduard Rydz-Smigly, immediately on Pilsudski's death, suc-
ceeded him as inspector-general of the army. He had been commander
of the first brigade of the Legionnaires.

The late Colonel Valerian Slawek, the prime minister when Pilsudski
died, and for years one of the three or four most important men in
Poland, was an intelligence officer in the first three hundred.

Colonel Aleksander Prystor, several times prime minister, one of the
famous little circle of “colonels,” was special adjutant for political affairs
in the Legion.

Colonel Joseph Beck, who was Polish foreign minister during the
years leading to the tragic events of 1939 — ^and who made plenty of
mistakes — ^was Pilsudski^s chief adjutant in the latter period of the
Legion and P.O.W,

Among others. Colonel Adam Koc, leader of the former Polish gov-
ernment party, the “Camp of National Unity,” was chief assistant to
Pilsudski in organizing the P.O.W. Boguslav Miedzinski, the editor
of the semi-official newspaper, Gaaeta Polska, was an intelligence officer
in both the Legion and P.O.W. Henri Floyar-Rajchmann, also an intel-
ligence man in the Legion, was minister of commerce and industry. Gen-
eral Roman Gorecki, president of the Polish state bank, was commander
of the second brigade of the Kadrowka, Janusz Jedrejewicz, chief of
intelligence for Lithuania in the P.O.W., became minister of education
and religion. Finally, General Sikorski, who is now the prime minister
of the Polish government in exile (and who resisted the 1926 Pilsudski
Putsch), was a Legionnaire.

These men were the essence of the ruling power in Poland, Pilsudski
was Alpha and Omega to them. Only those officers who were in the
original three hundred or who entered Kadrowka ranks immediately
thereafter, who were trained by Pilsudski himself in this strange Polish
equivalent of Eton and Oxford, counted in Poland. Thus Pilsudski’s

INSIDE EUROPE

486

colossal power. Like a father, he brought Poland up. And his children
ran it. Thus too, an inherent narrowness and weakness in the Polish
state structure — ^as 1939 proved.

Grandpa

As a rule Pilsudski was called not father — ^he was getting too old
toward the end — ^but Ddadek, grandfather. He called all his men ""Du'^
or respectful, they did not respond with such intimacy, but ad-

dressed him as Komendant, chief. That the old dictator was a turn-
coat, a ruffian, a lover of scatological language, a brigand, a befuddled
and idiosyncratic martinet (in his old days) was undeniable ; undeniably
also he was honest, capable of arousing great affection, and an implacable
patriot for Poland.

The career of the Dsiadek was one of the most extraordinary of
modern times. He was what the biologists might call a "'sport'' among
post-war revolutionary dictators. He was not, for instance, a man of
the people like Mussolini or Dollfuss or Kamal Ataturk; he was born
(in 1867 on an estate near Vilna) of an aristocratic Lithuanian family.
But passion for Poland drove him to revolutionary activity. Hatred of
Tsarist Russia, on nationalist grounds, dominated his life.

His mother, a tremendous Polish patriot and Russia-hater, allowed
him to desert the family tradition and become a Marxist, because at
that time the only effective revolutionary organization was socialist. As
a student of medicine (Pilsudski just failed to get an M.D. degree at
the University of iCharkov), he began insurrectionary activity. He was
arrested in 1887 and sentenced to exile in the Siberian lead mines for
participation in the plot to kill Tsar Alexander III for which Lenin's
older brother was hanged. One of Pilsudski's brothers was likewise exe-
cuted. Motivation for a revolutionary!

In 1893 he returned from Siberia and became editor of the socialist
newspaper, Robotnik (Workman). He flitted from place to place pub-
lishing it ; the police did not find him and his secret peripatetic printing-
press for seven years. In 1900 he went to jail again in the terrible
“Pavilion No. 10" of the Warsaw citadel, a dungeon reserved for the
worst political offenders. He escaped — ^by feigning insanity 1 Fooled, the
prison doctors sent him to an asylum in St. Petersburg. With the con-
nivance of a Polish medical man he got away and returned to Poland.

He spent some years as a patriotic bandit, and in one coup in 1908
he robbed a mail train and got away with two million rubles. Almost at

POLAND AND THE BALTIC STATES 487

the same time another socialist revolutionary, Josef Stalin, performed
almost an identical feat in Tifiis, Georgia. (When, years later, Polish-
Soviet relations were straightened out, Stalin sent Pilsudski his tsarist
police dossier as a memento of their comradeship.) When the war came
Pilsudski dropped socialism, because he felt that the best way to resur-
rect Poland would be to work first with the Austria armies against the
Russians, then with a Polish army against the field. So he created the
Legions; witless, the Austrians permitted their organization.^

Pilsudski had by the time of the war become a potent and baffling
romantic legend. One story about him, widely believed, vras that he
disguised himself as a Russian cavalry officer, rode up to the Warsaw
jail, and ordered the release of all the Polish political prisoners ! On the
pretext that he had orders to lead them to a new jail he secured the
freedom of the lot.

He left his first wife in 1912 because, of all things, he accused her
of neglecting her children by a previous husband. His second wife was
a socialist comrade. She went to work in a factory at Grochow, just
outside Warsaw, when Pilsudski was imprisoned by the Germans. When
he returned to Poland in 1918 his first act as head of state was to fetch
the President's carriage, and, with a tremendous retinue behind silver
horses, drive to Grochow, find her, and return with her to the palace.
By her he had two children, Wanda, now twenty-two, and Jadwiga,
eighteen, of whom he was passionately fond.

Pilsudski was the author of the coup d'etat by which Poland seized
Vilna from Lithuania in 1920. Quizzed by the allied ministers in War-
saw, he staunchly denied his responsibility. Several days later he re-
signed office as head of state. He called the ministers together. “Gen-
tlemen,” he said, “the other day I lied to you. I was a public character
and I had to lie. Now I am a private individual and I can tell you
the truth. I did engineer the Vilna coup. Gentlemen, good morning.”

Blunt, gruff, he loved mystification. As he grew older his facial re-
semblance to Friedrich Nietzsche was very close; there were plenty
who said that he was unbalanced, who hinted that when he feigned
lunacy to escape the Russians the feat was not purely histrionic. He
continually perplexed his subordinates by trapping them with mislead-
ing statements ; he sent Beck and Prystor to the verge of nervous break-

^ Pilsudski in later years told a former comrade, “My friend, you and I caught
the socialist train together. I got off at ‘Polish Independence' statioa I wish you
good luck on your jour' ey to . . . Utopia." (Spectator, May 17, 1935.)

INSIDE EUROPE

488

downs by never communicating to them the policies he held them
responsible for executing.

Not long after the war the old marshal retired from politics; he
returned to power in 1926 to “restore order"' (incidentally killing six
hundred men on the streets of Warsaw) ; thereafter he governed from
the back seat, as minister of war. He was contemptuous of the deputies ;
the grizzled vigor of his language to them became famous. Few speeches
by Pilsudski could be printed verbatim in a Western newspaper. He died
thinking of his birth-land, Lithuania, and whispering messages to his
daughters. His last gesture was characteristic : he ordered his brain to be
given to the University of Warsaw for research ; his heart to be pre-
served in the crypt in Vilna which held his mother's ashes ; and his body
to be sent to a third place, Cracow, where lie the tombs of Poland's
ancient kings.

The ^XoloneW’^

Marshal Eduard Rydz-Smigly, the country's dominant figure after
the death of Pilsudski and until the invasion of Poland in 1939, was
not a professional soldier, but a Legionnaire. It was he, however, who
captured Kiev in the wild Polish assault on the U.S.S.R. in 1921. Rydz-
Smigly studied to be a portrait painter in his youth, and several Polish
museums contain— or contained — examples of his work. He was born
in 1886. The army became devoted to him — ^apparently — ^and therefore
Pilsudski arranged that he should become its chief, so that he could
bring it loyally to support of whatever new civil regime took power. Culti-
vated, quiet, he was the student type of officer. In June, 1936, he was
formally named ‘‘First Citizen" of Poland. He was — ^perhaps unfairly —
accused of negligence in the 1939 war, and is now an exile in Rumania.

Of all the Legionnaires, the man Pilsudski loved best was General
Soznkowski, the comrade who shared his imprisonment at Magdeburg.
This officer, ten years later, performed a feat of deeply quixotic and
Polish devotion ; he was a general in command of the division at Posnan
when he heard that Pilsudski, his old chief, was marching on Warsaw.
Soznkowski joined neither Pilsudski nor the forces of the government.
Instead — ^he shot himself. In shame that Poland was undergoing civil

®Most of the ‘'colonels,” incidentally, are not colonels. Either they got beyond
that and became generals (like the former minister of war Gen. Kasprzycki, who
began adult life as a mathematics teacher in Paris), or (like Kasprzycki again)
they were not soldiers by profession, but men who followed Pilsudski into the
Legion from various occupations.

POLAND AND THE BALTIC STATES 489

war, which might split the army, he fired a bullet in his breast, com-
mitted hara-kiri — ^and recovered ! By some miracle, the hole next to his
heart was stitched up. Pilsudski rewarded this dramatic expression of
divided loyalty by intimating that Soznkowski should be the next Presi-
dent of Poland.

Colonel Slawek, a companion of Pilsudski's from the earliest revolu-
tionary days, was a socialist conspirator ; making bombs for Pilsudski in
1903, he lost one side of his face in an explosion. His origins are mys-
terious; no one but Pilsudski, so the story went, knew where he was
born, or his real name. The report is that he was really a Count Czet-
wertynski, a scion of one of the greatest Polish noble families, who hid
these connections without trace when he joined the marshal thirty-five
years ago. Slawek became a pet of the Polish aristocrats, the Radziwills
and Potockis, who look to him as their own ; and it was Slawek who was
the bridge between Pilsudski and the aristocracy in the early days of the
reborn state. He killed himself in 1939.

Colonel Joseph Beck, born in 1894, somewhat less amiable a character
than his colleagues, was a special favorite of Pilsudski's in the latter days ;
the old man had great affection for him. Complicated, ingrown, moody,
elegant. Beck came from the low nobility in the Austrian part of Poland,
and began his career as a student of economics in Vienna. He joined
the Legion ; after the war Pilsudski gave him regular officer’s training
in the new military academy he set up in Warsaw. Then Beck went to
Paris as Polish military attache, but in 1923 he was booted out of
France. The accusation was never made public, but the French general
staff peremptorily expelled him apparently for abuse of diplomatic
privileges. Little did the Quai d’Orsay know that he would one day be
Polish foreign minister ! As foreign minister Beck, as we know, pursued
a pro-German policy for a considerable time; it did him no good — as
we also know. Beck is widely blamed for much of the misfortune that
has come to Poland. He went into exile in 1939.

The President of Poland until the present war was Ignacy Moscicki,
known as ‘Tgnace the Obedient,” He was, of all things, a distinguished
electro-physicist, called to politics from a professorship at the University
of Lwow. He was also head of the Chemical Research Institute in War-
saw. He has something like five hundred inventions in the field of
electro-physics and chemistry to his credit, and holds fifty-three patents,
like the pianist Paderewski, he was valuable to Poland’s politics largely
because his life was utterly unpolitical.

490

INSIDE EUROPE

Rseci^pospolita Polska

The nationalism of Poland, like that of Hungary, was — ^and still is
flamboyant and tenacious. This is partly because the country, as evei
one knows, has four times suffered the unique and terrible experier
of partition. Yet when Poland disappeared from the map in the eighteen
century there were only eight million Poles; when Woodrow Wils^
put it on the map again m 1919 there were twenty million. Despite t
supreme ordeal of concrete geographical dissolution, the country lived
and grew. Poland's resurrection gave it a sort of crucifix complex. T 1
was the source of many of its troubles. It rose from the dead and th
there was something holy about its survival. It began a career of pros
lytizing. It suffered from the delusion that it was not merely a sn
cession state, but a great power.

Polish nationalism was nicely illustrated in the old days by the el
phant story, which if legend is correct, was invented in an object!
moment by Paderewski.

Five men of different nationalities each write a book about an el
phant. The Englishman goes to India, organizes a hunt, and compos
a thick illustrated travelogue. How I Shot My First Elephant. T
Frenchman casually visits the Zoo and promptly produces a yellow-bac
UEUfant et Ses Amours. The German plunges into research ai
emerges some years later with a five-volume work. Introduction to
Monograph on the Study of the Elephant. The Russian gets drunk (
vodka, retires to his garret, and issues a slim philosophical treatise, Tt
Elephant — Does It Exist? The Pole sits down in the national libra
and turns out a flaming pamphlet. The Elephant and the Polish Questio

Poland may not have been a great power, but it was a country tl
physical bulk of which could not be ignored. Its population was 32
000,000, which increased at tlie tremendous rate of 500,000 per yea
in area it was the fifth state in Europe, Russia excluded. Its tremendoi
job was to amalgamate the Russian, German, and Austrian divisions <
the country into a homogeneous and viable whole. After that the chi<
internal problems were two : settlement of the minorities issue, becauj
the hungry Poles took more than their share of territory; of tl
32,000,000 people, between 8,000,000 and 10,000,000 were not Poles .
all, but Ukranians, Germans, White Russians, Galicians, Ruthene
Lithuanians. Second, to persuade God to raise agricultural prices.

As is the case with most Central European and Balkan countrie
between thirty-five and forty per cent of the budget went to armamen

POLAND AND THE BALTIC STATES

491

A peasant country, not rich m industrial resources, it bore the burden
of one of the most formidable military machines in the world. This was
necessary for reasons which now, alas, are only too obvious. Poland
lay exposed, without natural geographic borders, between two greater
powers, Germany and the U.S.S.R.

The foreign policy of Poland after 1919 was that of the nut in the
nutcracker. At first the orientation, as we know, was the alliance with
France and the Little Entente. Beck changed this ; aware of the growing
strength of Germany, and Germany’s desire to recover the Polish Corri-
dor, he took advantage of Hitler’s offer for a ten-year peace pact ; Ger-
many temporarily gave up claims on the Corridor in return for Polish
friendship. Germany and Poland united in what was potentially an anti-
Soviet bloc; just the same Beck went to Moscow as well as Berlin, and
a Polish-Soviet non-aggression treaty was duly signed. Russia never-
theless invaded Poland in September, 1939,® a few weeks after the Ger-
man invasion had begun.

General Sikorski

The leader of the refugee Polish government in France is one of the
best of Poles, General Ladislas Sikorski. He was born in 1881 near
Lvov, and became one of Pilsudski’s indispensable assistants w’hen war
came in 1914. He was an engineer by education, a soldier — and later
a politician — ^through arcumstance. In the early days of Polish inde-
pendence, say from 1919 to 1926, he was the most powerful figure in the
republic after Pilsudski, being at various times chief of staff, minister
of war, and prime minister. After 1926 he fell from favor, and lived
mostly in Paris. Here he came into close touch with the French general
staff ; he had been one of Weygand’s best friends for years. A convinced
democrat and very pro-French, he strongly disapproved of the Beck
policy which brought disaster to Poland. In 1938 he returned to Poland,
and was virtually interned. After the 1939 war, with Rydz-Smigly and
Beck disgraced, he inevitably came back to power. He is now prime
minister of the Polish government in exile, with a man who shares his
democratic views, the veteran August Zaleski, as his foreign minister.

Eyes North

To the north of Poland are the four Baltic States, each with indi-
vidual problems, but united by the same overwhelming geographical

» I have already described the Polish crisis before September in Chapter IX above.
Events of the war itself are discussed briefly in the introduction to this edition.

INSIDE EUROPE

492

consideration: former provinces of Russia, they were from 1919 to
1939 buffer states between Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union.
For a long time they represented a descending order of anti-Russianism
and pro-Germanism from north to south. Finland hated the Russians
most; Lithuania, at the bottom, disliked them least. Lithuanian policy
was grounded on fear of Germany and Poland. In 1939, as everyone
knows, Russia established naval and military bases in Lithuania, Latvia,
and Estonia, and invaded Finland.

Finland resembled a good deal the states we shall discuss in the next
chapter — ^the neutrals, like the Scandinavian countries, with their sensible
social ideals, advanced democratic methods, and comparatively high
standard of living. A sturdy and highly attractive country, Finland lived
on cellulose and timber and paid its debts; alone among European
countries it did not default on its war debt to America. It was part
of Sweden from 1154 A.D. to Napoleonic times, when the Russians
grabbed it; its affiliations to Sweden are close but it has tenaciously
held to its own language and national tradition. The Finns do not con-
sider themselves either ''Baltic"' or "Scandinavian," and a local political
issue has always been rivalry between "authentic" Finns and those of
Swedish blood.

The president of Finland, in December, 1939 when the Russian at-
tack got under way, was still Kyosti Kallio, the country's first peasant-
born prime minister. He is an agrarian ; the basis of his support is social
democratic. He succeeded 75-year-old Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, who
had been something of a reactionary. Under Kallio the most interesting
of contemporary Finns is the youthful foreign minister Juho Erkko,
who, the son of an exiled Finnish patriot, came to America at the age
of three and lived many years in Brooklyn, New York. Erkko is a
staunch and convinced democrat. His wife is British. He had a vivid
career in journalism and diplomacy before becoming foreign minister.
The veteran of Finnish military and political life is General Mannerheim,
who commanded the White Forces in the Finnish civil wars. He was
merciless to the Bolsheviks in 1919.

By contrast the next state to the south, Estonia, has been — ^until
1939 — ^more in the German orbit, and pro-German influences are strong.
Estonia is a republic about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont
together; its strategic position at the mouth of the gulf of Finland is
important, and the harbor of Tallinn, its charming capital, one of the
pleasantest cities in Europe, is an excellent naval base. The chief political

POLAND AND THE BALTIC STATES 493

personality is General Laidoner, the commander in chief. Estonia was
under martial law for a considerable period, all political parties were
suppressed, and, although a plebiscite in 1936 favored a return to repre-
sentative government, a new corporative constitution was created. But
the dictatorship was on the whole mild and benevolent.

The next country, Latvia, is an overt but sensibly run dictatorship
under an astute and picturesque peasant leader Dr. Karlis Ulmanis*
For years he was a professor at the University of Nebraska; he still
subscribes to American farm journals. In 1934 Ulmanis dismissed the
diet — at the same time shrewdly buying off discontent by pensioning
the deputies for life! He dissolved the political parties, and assumed
office as both president and prime minister. He is a doughty character ;
and his foreign secretary, Wilhelm Munters, is one of the youngest and
most attractive foreign ministers in Europe. The Latvians are tough
folk, the toughest — ^man for man — in all Europe probably. Latvia has
always sought to be the leader of the Baltic states; Finland excepted, it
is the largest, the strongest, and the most advanced. -Most Letts have
a strong pro-German streak ; they hate the U.S.S.R. intensely.

Lithuania, the fourth Baltic state, has the liveliest history of them
all. It is a wretchedly poor country, but picturesque; the primitive
capital, Kaunas, was for years a Russian garrison town — ^which it seemed,
in 1939, to be becoming again. From 1920, when Pilsudski seized Vilna,
until 1938, when Colonel Beck forcibly readjusted the situation, Lith-
uania was technically in a state of war with Poland, with the Polish-
Lithuanian border closed. Those who recall the middle 20’s may still
remember the first prominent Lithuanian leader, a bouncing character
named Valdemaras. In 1934 he attempted to make a coup d'etat The
strongest man in the country today is the commander in chief. General
Rastikas, who began life as a veterinarian. The president of the republic.
Professor Smetona, is best known for his remarkable wife, who is a
powerful personage in the affairs of the little state. Her sister is — or
was — ^the wife of the prime minister. The two sisters ran the country.
Lithuania for years feared and hated the Germans even more than
the Poles, and for a long time sought to be friendly with the U.S.S.R.
When the Russians entered Lithuania in 1939, after the Polish war,
they promptly gave Vilna back to Lithuania.

All the Balts are sturdy and — ^the Estonians possibly excepted —
somewhat insensitive folk. The story is, ‘^Stick a pin a Balt’s hand;
it will be half a minute before he jumps.”

494

INSIDE EUROPE

None of the Baltic states quite grew up. They would have reached
their twenty-first birthdays in 1940. But, as we know, in 1939 the
Soviet Union established virtual protectorates over all three.

Two Danger Spots

Two specific danger spots in the northern area were formerly Danzig
and Memel. Both were predominantly German cities separated from the
Reich by the Treaty of Versailles ; both grew up under the tutelage of
the League of Nations ; in 1939 Germany took both back. Danzig was
technically a free city, however, whereas Memel was on Lithuanian
territory.

The Polish Corridor, a wedge of land which outraged the Germans by
giving Poland an outlet to the sea at the cost of separating East Prussia
from the rest of Germany, was for years the most perilous territorial
issue in Europe. The Polish-German pact shelved it, and by so doing
temporarily reduced much of the dangerousness of Danzig, which is the
Corridor’s natural port. The Nazi party in Danzig, however, began to stir
up trouble; when Hitler started his 1939 campaign against Poland, Dan-
zig became its inevitable focal point. The Poles, at tremendous expense,
had built a rival port to Danzig — Gdynia. Germany, of course, took it
over in 1939 as spoils of war. It now seems inevitable that Danzig and
the Corridor — Gdynia also — ^will remain part of Germany.

Memel was detached from Germany in 1919 presumably to give
Lithuania an outlet to the sea; it was to be the Lithuanian equivalent
of Danzig. While the allies were still deliberating how exactly to draw
the frontiers, Poland under Pilsudski unconscionably seized the Lith-
uanian territory of Vilna; tit for tat, Lithuania then grabbed Memel.
The German Nazis violently agitated for the return of Memel to
Germany ; in retaliation, the Lithuanians treated the Germany minority
none too gently. The Memel issue became the kind of villainous national-
ist snarl for which there seemed no reasonable territorial solution. Then
Hitler took Memel, in March, 1939, when it became clear that neither
the Lithuanians nor anyone else could possibly resist.

The Aaland Islands

This group of islands in the Gulf of Bothnia between Finland and
Sweden may become a geographical and political issue of the first
importance. Both Finland and Sweden claimed them in the 1919 settle-
ments; the Aalanders themselves wanted autonomy. The dispute was

POLAND AND THE BALTIC STATES

495

brought to the League of Nations, early in the 20’s, and the League did
one of its first big jobs — ^ironic this seems now! — ^in settling it amicably
and fairly. The Finns retained sovereignty over the islands, it was pro-
vided that they should be demilitarized, and the population was given
wide autonomous rights. So, for almost twenty years, the Aaland
Island issue was forgotten.

In 1939 the Finns, seeing how the eastern winds were blowing,
opened negotiations with Sweden for permission to refortify the
islands. The Finns feared Russia; the Swedes feared Germany. The
Aaland group is the key to the fealtic. A great power entrenched there
could control almost impregnably any shipping between Swedish,
Finnish, Russian, German, and Baltic ports; such shipping might in-
clude Swedish iron ore, of inestimable value to a belligerent. The
Swedes and Finns agreed to refortify the islands jointly. Then the
U.S.S.R. protested, on the ground that the plan was a unilateral vio
lation of the 1919 treaties. So — ^in the angry summer of 1939 — ^the ques
tion of the islands was still a potential danger.

Chapter XXXV

The Notable Neutrals

A bout Sweden there is a fine and honorable thing to say: it has
^ had no war since 1814. This is a unique record, which no country
in the world can match. Likewise Sweden is notable in that it has no
foreign alliances of any kind ; the Swedes live alone and like it. Yet their
policy of strict neutrality, of comfortable self-assurance, does not isolate
them from the rest of Europe ; with a great history and a healthy na-
tionalism, they are intensely European in the best sense of that term;
from the beginning they have been sturdy advocates of the League of
Nations and international cooperation.

The Swedes have no empire to worry about, no big army to maintain,
no foreign entanglements to unwrinkle or smooth over; partly for this
reason — ^also of course because of something inherently solid and decent
in their character — ^they have made their own country, like Denmark,
peaceable and prosperous. Sweden and Denmark to-day are the two
healthiest countries in Europe. It is vastly refreshing to pause in this
swing around tortured Europe and inspect the Scandinavian states,
islands of tranquillity, rational behavior, and good government.

Sweden, together with Denmark, may be said to represent the highest
type of state paternalism yet seen in the world. When a Swede — or a
Dane — ^is born he becomes state property in a sense then and there. In
every town and village there is a child welfare board. Children go to
schools and universities maintained by the state; they grow up to join
an exceedingly elaborate social insurance scheme ; their old age is taken
care of by the most advanced old age and disablement insurance in
Europe. The Swede travels on railways operated by the state; he uses
state telephones ; the mines which produce the bulk of his exports are
state controlled ; even the alcohol he drinks is managed by an ingenious
system of state regulation.

There are the cooperatives too; they deserve a chapter to them-
selves. '‘Approximately one-third of all retail trade and more than ten
per cent of wholesale trade and manufacture for domestic consumption
are carried on by cooperatives without profit,'^ writes Marquis Childs
in “Sweden: The Middle Way.” The cooperatives have opened the way

496

497

THE NOTABLE NEUTRALS

to cheap housing (there are no slums in Sweden — or Denmark — any
more than there are any aged poor) and a comprehensive raising of liv-
ing standards. Denmark and Sweden have the highest standards of living
in Europe. Yet the essential privileges of capitalism are not abrogated.
People may possess private property, they may trade at a profit, they
may own production. Sweden, as Mr. Childs says, “is the country where
capitalism is controlled,’’ but where the individual remains free.

The three Scandinavian countries are brothers, but, as is often the case
with brothers, they are rather dissimilar in character. Denmark, a coun-
try of islands, swept always by a fresh swift breeze, is developed to the
last square inch. Of the tiny farms more than ninety per cent are culti-
vated by their owners. The Danes are, speaking broadly, more “conti-
nental” than Swedes and Norwegians ; they are closer to Europe and the
pressure of Germany. Sweden is a much more spacious country — if you
turn it around at the southernmost tip it would nearly reach Africa — less
intensively developed, bursting with water-power, living on export of
ore and manufactured goods as well as agriculture, and, in its northern
emptiness, reminiscent of Russia perhaps and even Asia. The Swedes,
by and large, are more formal than the Danes, more rugged perhaps,
with less cosmopolitan a capital — ^but one equally beautiful — ^and with
a shade more conscious nationalism. The Norwegians, again speaking
broadly, are more like the Danes than the Swedes. Their independence
is so comparatively recent that they take their nationalism very seri-
ously and sometimes fear that their neighbors don’t take it seriously
enough ; they changed the name of their capital from Kristiania to Oslo
and revived the indigenous Norwegian language, although for genera-
tions Dano-Norwegian was almost a common tongue. “The Norwegians,”
one of my Scandinavian friends once put it, “are, like their landscape,
rather vertical.” Their country is less rich than Sweden or Denmark,
the people are mostly of peasant stock, their chief exports are timber,
paper, pulp.

The resemblances are closer. The three countries have tightly in-
terrelated royal families; indeed the Danish and Norwegian kings are
brothers. Internal politics have followed the same general course in all
three countries, and all three have social democratic governments. Postal
rates are the same, the currency until recently was interchangeable, and
the languages are very similar. The three are friends, and work together
very closely ; the prime ministers meet regularly. All three represent the

INSIDE EUROPE

498

same ideals socially — child welfare, social reform, a high standard of
living, curtailment of the privileges of capitalism, education and cultural
development, evolutionary progress. There is no illiteracy m Scandinavia.
Infant mortality rates are the lowest in the world. None of the three, in
international affairs, has ambition beyond its frontiers ; there is no in-
stinct for aggression and no delusion of national grandeur.

Peace among the three, interestingly enough, is a comparatively recent
development. Denmark and Sweden fought each other more than once
before the nineteenth century. Both had designs on Norway. Norway got
loose from Denmark, rushed into the arms of Sweden, got tired of
Sweden, and set up a kingdom for itself — ^with a Danish prince as king.
The only recent international issue occurred in 1931 when Norway made
claims on the east coast of Greenland, Denmark's property. Instead of
fighting they turned to The Hague court; Norway lost, and like a
gentleman has never mentioned the matter since.

The royal families in each country are deliberate and successful demo-
crats. For the last two or three generations they have been born in
captivity, and any inkling toward despotism long since left the blood.
They are pleasant human beings, considerably popular, and much less
expensive politically than presidents. Nowadays they work in close har-
mony with socialist prime ministers.

The three kings make a handsome picture. All are spare and lean,
more than six feet tall ; Christian of Denmark is the tallest king in the
world, and the tallest man (reputedly) in his kingdom — six foot six. Ail
have reigned a long time: Haakon of Norway since 1905, Gustav of
Sweden since 1907, Christian of Denmark (Haakon's brother) since
1912. Gustav, at eighty-one, is still an active tennis player; he enters
the Riviera tournaments disguised as ^‘Mr. G." Possibly the ablest of
the three is Christian; his silver jubilee, celebrated this year, was an
impressive testimonial. Christian rides alone, through the streets of
Copenhagen, every morning at seven A.M. ; he stops at traffic lights and
the passersby salute him without ostentation. He likes to sail among the
Danish islands, dropping in without warning at the villages ; he knows
an extraordinary number of his subjects by name and face.

The families have intermarried regularly. The Danish Crown Prince,
Frederick (the Danes have alternated Christians with Fredericks for
four hundred years), married Ingrid, the daughter of the crown prince
of Sweden ; the crown prince of Norway, Olaf , married another Swedish
princess. They had a son, amid rejoicing, in 1936 — ^the first royal prince

THE NOTABLE NEUTRALS

499

to be bom in Norway since 1370. The oldest of the three families is the
Danish. The Swedish dynasty began in Napoleonic times with Marshal
Bernadotte, and the Norwegians have less history than the others, having
started from scratch in 1905.

All three families have distinguished themselves outside the royal
province. For instance the Danish crown prince is an accomplished
musician and orchestra conductor. The king's uncle, Prince Waldemar,
has four sons : one is in the French Foreign Legion, one in business.
Prince Eugene, brother of the king of Sweden, is a painter of distinction ;
Prince William, second son of King Gustav, is a widely traveled lecturer
and poet; the Swedish crown prince is a professional archeologist.

The dominant issue in Scandinavian foreign affairs is fear of Nazi
Germany and — since September, 1939 — of Soviet Russia. When I was
in Denmark and Sweden some years ago I wandered through their
foreign offices for days, looking for an issue. I would find it promptly
enough to-day. The Germans have designs on Scandinavia, particularly
Denmark, for obvious reasons. The Scandinavians are first-class Aryans.
Denmark might be a larder in case of war; Sweden might provide
precious raw material for arms. The Germans would like diplomatic
support at least from their northern cousins. Sweden has a tradition of
pro-Germanism, and there are prominent Danes, like the foreign minister,
Dr. Munch, who have seemed to favor the German side.

More than an3rwhere except Austria the Nazis turned the full weight
of their propaganda machine to Scandinavia. Emissaries flooded Den-
mark and Sweden ; the indigenous Germans were organized into Nazi or
quasi-Nazi groups ; parties closely analogous to the Nazis entered Swed-
ish, Danish, and Norwegian politics. For a time^ there were three Nazi
factions in Sweden, four in Norway, in Denmark two. A local group of
the German Nazi party exists in most important Scandinavian towns.

The fervor of German attempts at penetration defeated its own ends ;
it might fairly be said that Nazi agitation served to decrease rather than
increase normal pro-German sentiment. As Germany became more power-
ful, more restless, in international affairs, the Danes and the Swedes
became more alarmed. The Anglo-German naval pact seemed to give
the German navy domination in the Baltic. German naval vessels were
continually experiencing ‘^engine trouble" in obscure Norwegian fiords
(where Swedish ore might be shipped to German ports) ; German leaders

^ See ‘The Nazis in Scandinavia,” by Joachim Joesten, Foreign Affairs, July,

1937.

INSIDE EUROPE

500

developed the habit of cruising in Scandinavian waters outside the
tourist season. The Germans made no secret of their fortification of the
island of Sylt, off the Danish coast.

When Finland was invaded by Russia, alarm throughout Scandinavia
became pressing. The Soviet Union replaced Germany as the chief
potential foe. As a result came (a) an increased socialist and labor vote
in all three Scandinavian countries and (b) Scandinavian rearmament.
The three countries, reluctantly, regretfully, after so many years outside
the sphere of continental politics and competitive armament, were
forced to mend their military programs. Denmark, which only a few
years before had contemplated abolishing its army altogether, intro-
duced a defense bill of twenty million kroner ; Norway lifted its military
budget from about nine to more than thirteen million dollars ; Sweden
raised its defense appropriation twenty-two per cent.

Per Albin Hansson, born near Malmo in 1885, is the Swedish prime
minister. His father was a mason; he was once an errand boy in a
country store. At twelve he worked in a grocery at $1.00 per week,
with hours from six A.M. to nine P.M. ; through a cooperative he en-
tered the trade-union movement and labor politics ; at nineteen he was
editor of a socialist newspaper. He has always liked journalism. In his
first cabinet there were five journalists besides himself.

Hansson, the story goes, tried to evade military service by drinking
a lot of black coffee, smoking a dozen cigars, and racing to the medical
examination. He was accepted just the same — ^and became the strictest
corporal in the regiment. He was an early prohibitionist, and thun-
dered against alcohol with a quotation from Aristotle : "‘Those who go to
bed drunk beget only daughters.”

Mr. Hansson, universally known in Sweden as Per Albin, succeeded
to the leadership of the social democratic party on the death of the grand
old man of Swedish socialism, Hjalmar Branting. (Incidentally Branting
and King Gustav were classmates at the University of Upsala and close
friends.) Hansson formed his first cabinet in 1932, the first labor prime
minister in Swedish history, when the liberals then in power were dis-
credited by repercussions of the Kreuger crash ; he took office again in
1936. The agrarians are represented in his coalition.

The leader of the agrarian party is Axel Pehrsson, Bramstorp. (There
are so many Pehrssons in Sweden that often they add their village to
their names.) He is a wealthy farmer, bom near Hansson's birthplace

THE NOTABLE NEUTRALS

501

in the fat lands of Skaane, fifty-seven now, powerful, ambitious. He likes
to tackle any variety of job. The story goes that a friend of Pehrsson’s,
looking through the local paper, said, “A position as midwife is vacant;
it’s strange Pehrsson hasn’t yet applied.”

Denmark, the oldest kingdom in the world, is a slender little country —
though it lives on butter, bacon, and eggs. It is small, less than twice the
size of Vermont — but its sinuous coastline is as long as that of European
Russia. The unmelancholy Danes number only 3,550,000 people — but
they provide thirty per cent of the world’s export butter, more than sixty
per cent of its bacon. Their cooperatives are even more advanced than
those of Sweden ; they handle ninety per cent of Danish milk and they
send to England alone no fewer than 56,000,000 neatly stamped and
dated eggs per year.

The dominant Dane, one of the most remarkable of present-day Euro-
pean figures, is Thorvald Stauning, the prime minister.

Stauning is a modern Viking — ^in a workman’s cap. He is six feet
three ; he weighs two hundred and fifty pounds ; he has a luxuriant red
beard, now turning gray. His features are massive, his voice is like a
foghorn ; he has, even notably among Danes, who like life, an inordinate
capacity to enjoy existence. Yet this decisive and dramatic character,
exuding vigor and masculinity, was weakly and poor as a boy ; he started
work in a tobacco factory when still a child ; his struggles were crush-
ingly long and difficult.

Stauning is sixty-six. He was born in Copenhagen, the son of a cart-
wright. He worked as a cigar-roller and led his trade-union. He entered
journalism on a social democrat newspaper and in 1906 was elected
to the Rigsdag. His rise was quick. Very early he showed the chief
reasons for his success — ^vigor plus great common sense and practical
faith in his ideas. As long ago as 1916 he was a cabinet minister, the first
labor cabinet minister in Scandinavia ; in 1924 he became prime minister.
He resigned in 1927 -when he was defeated on a proposal to introduce
a capital levy (to augment the social services) ; he returned to power
in 1929 and has been in power, the leader of a labor coalition, ever since.

In 1930 he proposed what amounted to the abolition of Denmark’s
armed forces. A step so sensible (at the time) and sensational shocked
Europe. Stauning said that Denmark was bound to be defeated if it were
invaded by a great power ; therefore it was nonsense to resist and that
the business of policy should be to avert war, not prepare for it. He

INSIDE EUROPE

502

suggested the reduction of the army to a nominal police force of 13,000
men, severe restriction of the navy, and diminution of the defense budget
from 56,000,000 kronen a year to 18,000,000. The bill was defeated.
Presently the Nazis came to power in Germany, and it is doubtful if
Stauning to-day would reintroduce his bill.

In 1934 he presented a bill to abolish the Landsting or Upper Cham-
ber of parliament, because it was impeding socialist reforms. Yet, like
most of the Scandinavian socialists, Stauning is a moderate, with a
strictly pragmatic view of progress.

Stauning vigorously opposed a suggestion by the Swedish foreign
minister, Dr. Sandler, for a Scandinavian defensive entente. “Denmark
will not be Scandinavia’s watchdog,” he announced. Denmark, as he
well knows, the nearest state to Germany, is the one most in danger of
aggression ; he fears that Denmark might have to pull Swedish or Nor-
wegian chestnuts from the fire if all were united in a common policy.

Literate, literary, Stauning has written plays. One, “The Lies of Life,”
was a great success in Copenhagen.

The Norwegian prime minister is Johan Nygaardsvold. He was the
son of a poor farmer, and worked in a sawmill from his twelfth year.
For six years, after emigrating to the U.S.A., he did pick and shovel
work on the western railways. He was a member of the I.W.W. for a
time. He returned to Norway, got a trade-union job, and entered
politics. He has been in the Storting (parliament) since 1915 and has
led the labor party since 1932, a socialist to the bone. When he gets into
difficulties he says, “It’s because I couldn’t shut up.”

Nygaardsvold, with the help of the farmers’ party, became Norway’s
first labor prime minister in 1935.

Paid van Zeeland and the State of Belgium

Belgium, the most densely populated state in Europe, has been an
independent kingdom since 1830, when it broke away from the Nether-
lands. The country is a compact triangular bridge between France and
Holland, and its people partake of the nature of both neighbors. Power-
fully industrial, the factories of Belgium ship manufactured goods all
over the world. The chief problem of internal politics — seldom reaching
an acute stage, however — ^has been the fight of the Flemish provinces,
where Flemish (instead of French) is spoken, for what might be called
linguistic autonomy. The constitution, under which Belgium is “a con-

THE NOTABLE NEUTRALS

503

stitutional and representative” monarchy, has one unique provision —
that the king, if he has no male heirs, may with the consent of parliament
nominate his successor.

The most prominent Belgian politician at the present time, since Emile
Vandervelde, the socialist leader, became inactive, is a brilliant new star
in the constellation of European statesmen, Paul van Zeeland. This
young man — he is only forty-six — ^lias rare quality.

One thing making him attractive to Americans is his close connection
with Princeton University. He did post-graduate work at Princeton
after the war, and in 1937 returned to accept an honorary degree. He
told Frederick Birchall of the New York Times recently that he always
thinks of himself as a Princeton man, that his brother followed him there,
that his nephew is a Princeton student now, and that assuredly his son
will go to Princeton too.

Once in 1934 — ^according to Time — ^Van Zeeland and a Yale graduate
worked together at a banking conference; the friend scribbled him a note
to the effect that Yale footballers had just beaten Princeton, 7-0. Van
Zeeland sent a note back. ‘‘Belgian cabinet : Princeton, 2 ; Yale, o.” For
one of his cabinet ministers, Vicomte de Warnaffe, was also a Prince-
tonian.

Van Zeeland was born in Soignies, the seventh of eight children, in
1893. The family were Dutch burghers — ^but profound Roman Catholics
— ^who emigrated to French-speaking Belgium generations ago. Van
Zeeland is a strict Catholic. He went to the University of Louvain, and
was taken prisoner when the war came. He spent the next years in
prison camps in Germany and then, after the war, joined a mission of
the Belgian Relief Commission in the United States.

A wide traveler, an earnest student, he has visited the United States
several times, the U.S.S.R. once, the Near East once. His thesis at
Princeton dealt with the Federal Reserve system; he wrote a book on
Soviet Russia ; in 1933 he delivered a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins
for the Walter Hines Page school of international relations.

Van Zeeland, one of the most valuable of European politicians, was
drafted into politics almost despite himself. From 1922 to 1935 he was
quite busy at two other careers : in the Belgian National Bank, of which
he became vice-governor in 1926 at the age of thirty-three ; and at the
University of Louvain, where he was professor of economic science from
1928. He entered the cabinet inconspicuously as minister without port-
folio, to watch economic matters; in 1935 he became prime minister

INSIDE EUROPE

504

for the first time and as his first major job devalued the Belgian cur-
rency. His general policy followed with some similarity the New Deal
of Franklin Roosevelt.

Two notable events have distinguished the history of Belgium — ^and
of Paul van Zeeland — during past few years. One was the rise and fall
of a Fascist party, the ‘"Rexists” led by a young sub-Hitler, Leon
Degrelle. He was a good-looking young man, stuffed with personality
as well as Fascist doctrine ; he got votes, so they said, by *‘Rex- Appeal.”
The movement was a serious menace to Belgian democracy until Van
Zeeland, who had never run for office," accepted Degrelle's defy to run
against him in a by-election. Van Zeeland won crushingly.

The other event, of great international importance, was the announce-
ment made directly by King Leopold III in October, 1936, that Belgium
would give up the French alliance and revert to its pre-war status of
neutrality. This caused some months of worry and uneasiness for French
and British statesmen. The Belgian case was simple : the Belgians didn’t
want to be the cockpit of the next war, yet both the Locarno treaty and
the temporary post-Locarno agreement between Britain, France, and
Belgium provided that Belgium go to the defense of France if France
were attacked by Germany. In April, 1937, a joint Anglo-French declara-
tion released Belgium from its Locarno obligations and at the same time
renewed French and British guaranty of Belgian independence.

In other words Belgium is no longer obliged to help its big friends,
but the big friends continue their pledge to help her.

Dutch and Swiss

Dr. Hendrikus Colijn is the most important of modern statesmen of
the Netherlands. He has been prime minister ofif and on since 1925.
Dr. Colijn, like his friend Van Zeeland, only entered politics after suc-
cessful years in several other professions. He was born of Calvinist
stock in 1869, destined by his parents to become a farmer. But he
wanted to be a soldier ; he enlisted in the Dutch army as a private, and
went for service to the Dutch East Indies, where he spent almost twenty
years.

In 1909 he returned to the Netherlands and entered business. For
some years he was a director of Royal Dutch Shell and other oil com-
panies. Concurrently politics gained his attention, and Col. Colijn, the
soldier-administrator (for a time he had been deputy governor of
Sumatra) became Dr. Colijn, the leader of the ^'Anti-revolutionary”

THE NOTABLE NEUTRALS

505

party. He edited a newspaper, reflecting his strong Calvinist views,
served as war minister, minister of finance, and minister of colonies,
and finally reached the premiership.

Colijn’s chief characteristic — omitting such personal details as that
he smokes twenty-five cigars a day — ^is a middle-of-the-road shrewdness.
He is the ‘'non-nonsense'' type of hard-headed Dutchman, and his canny
intelligence was such as to command the intense respect of his sovereign,
the massive Wilhelmina, one of the shrewdest persons alive herself.
Colijn always headed a minority party, and led coalitions chiefly through
the favor of the Queen. His colonial experience gave him perspective
and a world view of politics, as well as intimate knowledge of the
precious life blood of Holland — ^the Indies.

By all odds the chief political preoccupation of the Netherlands, from
both domestic and external points of view, is fear of Germany. Holland
for a time had an obstreperous Nazi party, led by A. A. Mussert ; Dr.
Colijn squashed him in the 1937 elections. Dutch conceptions of national
defense had to be radically revised when Hitler came to power. For one
thing, the traditional Dutch method of defense — opening the dikes — ^had
to be augmented. For another, both France and Belgium have their
lines of concrete fortifications ; Holland has none, and therefore
feared that Germany might be tempted to attack through the exposed
Dutch flank. Holland raised her defense budget by $36,000,000 in
1937 -

Dr. Colijn is one of the fathers of the so-called “Oslo group” of
powers, the states named in this chapter plus Finland, Luxembourg, and
Iceland. They are parties to a convention pledging members not to raise
tariff barriers without mutual consent, and to work otherwise for eco-
nomic unity and betterment.

On January 7, 1937, the heiress to the Dutch throne. Princess Juliana
of Orange-Nassau, married young Prince Bernhard of the house of
Lippe-Biesterfeld. So far they have two daughters.

Switzerland, the oldest republic in the world, trilingual, irrefragably
neutral, tough and independent, is governed by a federal council of
seven men. One of them each year becomes president of the confedera-
tion; the others are the equivalent of cabinet ministers. The president
cannot succeed himself except after an interval. In practice, the presi-

INSIDE EUROPE

506

dency rotates among the seven counselors; the president to-day. Dr,
Giuseppe Motta, was also president in 1915, 1920, 1927, and 1931.

Dr. Motta, a strong Catholic, was born in Ticino in the Italian part
of Switzerland, the son of a hotelkeeper. He studied law at Fribourg,
Munich, Heidelberg, and entered politics as a young man ; for twenty
years he has been a member of the federal council. He is the father of a
large family, reputedly he knows Dante by heart, he gets a salary of
$7,000 per year, he has a blameless record in private life, and in external
politics he seems very decidedly to follow a pro- Vatican, pro-Mussolini
course.

Switzerland too feels the Nazi menace, and fears possible attack by
Germany. A local Nazi party, the Grey Shirts, rose in prominence after
1933 ; all the countries on the periphery of Germany, without exception,
have seen these sub-Hitler movements rise and fall. Switzerland, like
the Netherlands, is mending her defenses. In 1936 a bill was intro-
duced providing for a professional army — ^after 650 years of reliance
on a national militia. In 1938 the defense bill was a cool $250,000,000 —
a staggering sum for the small republic.

Chapter XXXVI

Half a League Onward

^^Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said
This is my own, my native landf*

N othing is easier than to sneer at the poor old League of Nations,
foisted on the allied powers by an American, Woodrow Wilson,
because he happened to care more for the United States of the World
than the United States of America. Like a virgin in a bawdy house,
calling piteously for a glass of lemonade (as Ben Hecht put it), Wilson
roamed the corridors of Versailles, emerging finally with the League as
America’s only spoils of war. It gives one a start to read the Covenant
to-day and see that paragraph three of Article Five still says, ‘The
first meeting of the Assembly and the first meeting of the Council shall
be summoned by the President of the United States.”

Nothing was easier in the old days than to list the charges commonly
made against the League. Speaker after speaker mounts the Assembly
tribune — and tells the world what everybody already knows. Nothing
happens at the Council table until the powers that be have settled the
business beforehand — ^and in secret. What the League mostly does is
try to act long after the time for action. The League does nothing but
spawn a plethora of feeble committees. The League provided a means
for minorities to voice their grievances ; therefore minorities have been
doubly nuisance-makers. The League compelled the registration of
treaties; so treaties nowadays have more secret clauses than before.
The League is a junta of the Versailles powers. And so on. And so on.

Some of these charges are true. But the point to make is that the
countries themselves, not the League, are responsible for most of the
weaknesses of the Geneva system. The League as such has no sovereign
rights. It has no authority to compel a state to follow its recommenda-
tions. The League is a pool of all the member powers, but it has no
executive rights over any individual country. The League is not a super-
state; it is merely the mouthpiece of member states when happily and

507

INSIDE EUROPE

508

rarely they reach agreement. The League itself decides nothing; the in-
dividual states bear all responsibility.

The Covenant, moreover, was written on the assumption that the
United States of America would be a signatory. When Senator Lodge
and his band of irreconcilable isolationists refused ratification of the
Versailles Treaty, they torpedoed the Covenant almost beyond recovery.
With the United States a League member, sanctions could have abso-
lutely outlawed an errant state. But American withdrawal from the
League system made effective sanctions all but impossible, because
America, by insisting on its neutral right of trading with an aggressor,
could frustrate any League blockade. The British Navy, necessarily the
chief instrument of a blockade, would not risk conflict with the United
States.

In assessing the value of the League one should first separate its
non-political activities from those entangled in nationalist politics. That
the League has done sturdy service in extra-political fields is, of course,
undeniable. In collating statistics on a wide international basis, in
forming the nucleus of a reasonable world approach to matters of
health, agriculture, the drug traffic, transport, refugees, codification of
law, its value is indisputable, and only a persimmon-minded Pharisee
could minimize it. One should not forget, too, the able work of the
League in finance and economics, particularly the attempt to stabilize the
Danube countries after the war.

As to politics, the thing to keep in mind is that the League is an
admirable mechanism for settling international disputes when — and only
when — ^the great powers agree. It is silly to say that the League, even
if it has no executive authority, cannot stop wars; it has stopped at
least one war which might have been extremely dangerous — for instance
the Bulgar-Greek conflict in 1926 — ^and it can stop others provided
Britain and the other great powers are united in wanting them stopped.
When the British and Russians and Italians see eye to eye, the Geneva
system works — ^swiftly and well. For instance, the League prevented
the Jugoslav-Hungarian outbreak in 1934 from developing into war.
This averted a first-rate international crisis. But when the powers dis-
agree, then the League is blocked.

The League's record as an administrator of doubtful territories is
almost beyond reproach. Remember the Saar. The prime minister of
Saarland was a tough and gallant Briton, Geoffrey Knox. In his ‘‘cabi-
net” were a Frencfanan, a Saarlander, a Jugoslav, a Film. They were

HALF A LEAGUE ONWARD

509

neutral and impartial; they had no local axes to grind; they had no
political ambitions; and they (their predecessors also) gave the Saar
fifteen years of distinct prosperity and peace. Another case in point is
Danzig, where, until the Nazis got completely out of hand, the Irishman
Sean Lester, the League’s man, made an excellent administration.

Suppose Lithuania, say, or Austria, should be internationalized and
placed under a completely impartial and disinterested extra-national
cabinet. Suppose that the minister of finance was a Swede, because he
was the best man in the world available for the post, and the minister
of communications a Greek or Swiss, chosen for efficiency. Suppose the
police were commanded by a Dane and his men were Indian, Italian,
Uruguayan, or what you will, picked like the Saar ‘‘Expeditionary”
Force. The idea is so sensible that it is, of course, fantastic. It won’t
work because it strikes at the most “precious” boast of a people, its
nationalism. The only thing against it is human and political nature.
Which is what makes evolution of the League so heartbreakingly diffi-
cult.

The League is, as Edgar Ansel Mowrer put it, the product of thou-
sands of years of slow ethical growth. Feeble as it may be, it “speaks
for a much larger proportion of the world than any other human insti-
tution.” It represents — ^I quote a recent letter in the London Times —
“man’s first fumbling approach to national decency, conceived in the
spiritual anguish of the War.” And it has been in operation less than
a generation, which in the historical process is a very brief interval
indeed. I remember President Masaryk saying to me in Prague, “It is
only fifteen years since the War — ^an instant’s flash. Give us time — ■
time ”

The brief history of the League may be divided into four periods.
Until the Treaty of Locarno in 1925 it was for the most part the instru-
ment of the victorious powers, strengthening the peace against the up-
ward writhings of the vanquished. Then till 1933, when Germany
departed, it laboriously struggled with the problem of disarmament ; viz.,
the allied powers refused to obey their pledges and to disarm, and the
disarmament conference collapsed. From 1933 to 1937 the major issue
was “collective security,” so called. This meant an attempt to bring
Germany into a security system on the basis of more or less equal
rights.

The Abyssinian dispute cut dramatically across this movement. The
greatest day in the history of the League was October 6 , 1935# when

INSIDE EUROPE

510

Article Sixteen was invoked and sanctions against Italy were put into
motion. For the first time, a major power was formally condemned
for violation of the Covenant, and by a unanimous vote of the Council —
despite the prophets who never dreamed that Article Sixteen could be
applied — Italy was declared an outlaw state, deemed to have declared
an act of war against all League states. Shades of Wilson ! The League
was born!

Thereafter came the fourth period — ^which persisted until the out-
break of war in 1939 — of bitter disillusion. The League was helpless
and impotent before the immense pressure of Fascist aggression. But
the prestige of a person or an institution often ebbs and flows. The
League was at low-water after the Abyssinian debacle and during the
successive Hitlerite coups. But this was not the fault of the League as the
League, but of the great powers comprising it.

Peace Palace

^The League secretariat comprises six hundred and thirty-seven men
and women of forty-four nationalities, and there are some queer fish
among them. All take a solemn pledge to the League, and the group
represents the nearest approach to an international civil service that the
world has yet seen. <

The secretary-general, Joseph Avenol, is a Frenchman; his deputy
is Irish. The under-secretaries are British and Argentinian and the
chiefs of section comprise two Britishers, one Italian, one Greek, one
Swiss, one Norwegian, one Swede, one Pole, one Dutchman, one South
African, and one American, the astute and amiable Arthur Sweetser.
These men are the “cabinet” of the League. In various sections the
number of different nationalities is augmented. In the information sec-
tion, for instance, there are men and women of seventeen countries.^
This melee does not, however, produce much discord. The former
secretary-general. Sir Eric Drummond, told a friend that quarrels in
the staff, when they rarely occurred, were usually between people of
the same nationality.

Members of the secretariat represent a cross-section of equipment

^Holland, the United States, Switzerland, France, Italy, Poland, Jugoslavia,
Belgium, England, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Spain, Qiina, Hungary, India,
Chile. Several individuals are, moreover, multi-national; for instance one vigorous
member of the secretariat, M. Zilliacus, was bom in Japan of a Finnish father and
American mother ; he was educated in Sweden, England, and the U.S.A. ; he mar-
ried a Pole and is a naturalized Englishman.

HALF A LEAGUE ONWARD

51 *

as well as nationality. There are former soldiers, professors, engineers,
diplomats, newspapermen, health officers, lawyers, economists. Most
are strenuous idealists, and all are devoted to the League. A fair share of
them entered League service, young men — ^in the original secretariat
there were only two men over forty — fresh from the war and de-
termined to give voice to their disillusion and idealism. Some were in-
veterate internationalists even then; Pierre Comert, for instance, for
many years head of the information section, was a teacher of French
in a German University.

The chief ‘‘personalities’’ commonly associated with the League were
conspicuous delegates from the powers, like the fabulous Titulescu of
Rumania, Dr. Benes of Czechoslovakia, and young Anthony Eden who
was by all odds Geneva’s star attraction. The head of the secretariat, M.

^ Avenol, born in 1879, is French and yet has been called the Frenchman’s
conception of a typical Englishman. He is extremely shy, a little slow,
tenacious; he never gets excited, he loves England, and has a passion
for bulldogs and gardening. Avenol was a financial expert, an adviser
to the French treasury who worked in England on inter-ally financial
problems; he was once offered the governorship of the Banque de
France, but he preferred Geneva.

In 1939 the League went into forced temporary retirement. The great
new building on Lake Geneva looked like an ivory mausoleum. Inside,
ghosts walked.

Perish the Treaties?

The Treaty of Versailles, the alleged source of all our woes, is a
sturdy document running to four hundred and fifty-three pages which
weighs just under three pounds. You can buy it at H M. Stationery
Office for the very reasonable sum of two shillings and sixpence, and
it is an interesting lot of reading matter for the money.

Some of its clauses, written in passion in 1919, seem outrageous and
indefensible now, like the “Hang the Kaiser” and war-guilt paragraphs.
Large parts, you discover with some amazement, are long since out of
date ; the cry to revise the treaty still resounds, but as a matter of fact
the document has already been so whittled down that not much except
the territorial clauses are left. Reparations, Rhineland, disarmament,
the Polish corridor, are no more than waste paper now. Parts VI, VII,
VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, of the treaty have disappeared.

This served to make more pressing the demand for territorial revi-

INSIDE EUROPE

512

sion. The allies gave way to Germany, though with ill grace, first on
the financial clauses of the treaty, then on German rearmament, then
on the Rhineland. Territory was not so easy for the allies to give
away. So the Germans simply took what they wanted. Then came
deadlock on the question of returning the mandated territories, former
German colonies, to Germany.

As a matter of blunt fact, the territorial provisions of the treaties,
including even those dealing with the Danube and Baltic, were not
so utterly indefensible — some minor instances excepted — ^as is generally
assumed. The basis of the settlement was" self-determination ; frontiers
were drawn with ethnic considerations predominant. As a result,
whereas in pre-1914 Europe something like 45,000,000 people lived
under foreign domination — ^including the whole of what was Poland
till 1939, the whole of Czechoslovakia, the whole of the Baltic States
and much of Jugoslavia — ^the situation before the outbreak of war in
1939 was that only about 16,800,000 were genuine minorities. The
fact cannot be denied that, as Hamilton Fish Armstrong put it, ''vastly
more people on the continent of Europe live under their own national
regimes than before.” The trouble was that the allied powers over-
stepped themselves, and created — ^as we have seen — ^new minorities by
grabbing what didn’t belong to them. But it should be pointed out that
some frontier lines, like that between Hungary and Rumania, can
never be drawn without leaving some miserable folk on the wrong side
of the border. In much of Europe, no finally and completely national
frontier can be written.

Another point shotdd be kept in mind. If Germany had won the
war, the Treaty of Versailles might not have been nearly so nice a
one.

War and Peace

The forces making for war, the source and embodiment of all in-
decency and evil, were before 1939 the following :

First, rival nationalisms. We have noted ad nauseam the internecine
hatreds of much of Europe. "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoun-
drel” ; war is the last refuge of a patriot. And there were many "profiteers
in patriotism” in Europe during the 30's.

Second, economic stresses. The last war caused the last economic
crisis; the last economic crisis helped cause the next war. The unity

HALF A LEAGUE ONWARD

513

and confidence of capitalism were shaken; national poverty unloosed
unpredictable international forces.

Third, the outward push of countries like Germany and Italy that
were starved for raw materials, which coincided with their political revi-
sionism, their nationalist urge to destroy the treaties and thus expand.
Five countries in the world possess about seventy-five per cent of the
total of the world’s key-products. Germany, Italy, and Japan were not
among them.

Fourth, the difficulty of localizing civil disturbances; Europe was so
interlocked that a revolution ih Austria with 6,500,000 people, could set
100,000,000 marching; frontiers were multiplied by Versailles, Europe
‘‘balkanized,” and the whole Continent enmeshed in rickety alliances.

Fifth, the incapacity of certain peoples to develop democratically.

Sixth, the growth of armament. Millions of armed men could not sit
around with billions of dollars’ worth of guns and ammunition and
just twiddle their thumbs — ^indefinitely.

Seventh, the fact that the United States of America was not a mem-
ber of the League, which would have been a thousand per cent more
effective with American adherence.

Eighth, the spread of Fascism, and the explosive force of personali-
ties like Hitler.^

The forces making for peace might — before 1939 — ^have been out-
lined as follows by an optimist :

First, wars cost money, and everybody was poor. Nobody paid for
the last war — except the dead. (On the other hand, of course, domestic
poverty may tempt a country — Italy, for instance, to break out, both
as an effort to cloak discontent at home, and, more “legitimately,’^ to
seek wealth abroad. Also one may note that the less wealth a country
has, the less it stands to lose by war.)

Second, the general tempo of the economic crisis seemed to be an ano-
dyne. The struggle of almost all nations to keep from drowning in the
seas of their own poverty served for a time, to a certain extent, to mini-
mize the danger of conflict. (On the other hand, note that in Austria, for
instance, economic difficulties tended to increase the chance of civil war.)

Third, the peace treaties went a considerable way toward drawing
a correct ethnic map of Europe, and thus removed many former sources
of revolutionary and international friction. There should have been

* The actual course of events leading to the outbreak of war in 1939 are sketched
in Qiapters VIII and IX above.

514 INSIDE EUROPE

approximately 30,000,000 fewer Europeans anxious to upset the apple
cart.

Fourth, in 1914, in Europe there were eighteen kingdoms or em-
pires, four of them ruled by absolute or nearly absolute monarchs, and
only two republics. In 1938 there were twelve kingdoms, none of them
absolute, and fifteen republics. Absolutist wars in the fashion of former
centuries, arranged between royal houses almost like their marriages,
seemed out of fashion. (On the other hand, totalitarian Fascist dicta-
tors could with equal impunity throw their countries into war.)

Fifth, it could have been said that a |[eneral European war might,
if it went on long enough, produce revolution and communism every-
where. The knowledge that the Kremlin would very likely be the
beneficiary of a new world war might, conceivably, have tended to
prevent one. But — ^lamentably! — ^it didn’t turn out that way, even
though the Kremlin may indeed turn out to be the beneficiary.

Vishmland What Avatar?'*

So now we come to the end of this long and crowded parade through
Western Europe. War aside, what are the other tendencies made mani-
fest? What chords, subordinate to the main diapason peace-and-war, are
clear?

1. The status-quo group of powers, beneficiaries of the peace treaties,
began to lose their overwhelming dominance.

2. Political nationalism, founded on poverty, hate, and economic
jealousy, is still the biggest force determining the policy of every
country.

3. Powerful personalities, like Hitler, Goering, Mussolini, Horthy,
Stalin, Franco, Inonii, Metaxas, dominate those countries where people
are too feeble or immature politically for democracy.

4. The small democratic states are those which — ^until the outbreak of
war in 1939 at least — survived the trying ardors of the ’thirties best.
Scandinavia, Switzerland, Holland, have a higher standard of living than
their neighbors; they sought to stay outside the general stream of Euro-
pean madness.

5. The world economic crisis has lifted considerably. But the agri-
cultural countries in Central Europe and the Baltic regions are still
hard hit by the agrarian collapse and the industrial countries still find
their markets shriveled.

6. Liberal democracy was a handmaiden to private capitalism; the

HALF A LEAGUE ONWARD 515

world economic crisis dealt private capitalism a staggering blow, and
democracy innocently enough took the consequences. The party system,
in any number of countries, was discredited, and in most states it was
replaced by authoritarian regimes.

7. Fascism covered two-thirds of Europe. And gradually it came
to be realized that Fascism was more of a Radical than a conservative
economic force.

8. The Rome-Berlin axis, following the seizure of Austria by Hit-
ler, broke down. Complete collaboration by the Fascist powers did not
take place.

9. The British and French after the outbreak of war in 1939 came
closer together than ever in their history.

10. The great broad mass of middle liberals and democrats were
almost everywhere perplexed by the painful necessity to turn sharply
to either right or left. The good old comfortable middle ground was
disappearing.

11. Left groups, despite immense obstacles, sought to unite; in the
Saar, underground in Austria, in Spain, in France, a United Left
Front was organized against reaction. In almost all countries some sort
of movement toward the Front Populaire idea began.

12. Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Albania disappeared. Finland was
attacked, and the three Baltic states came under Russian domination.
Everywhere, the small border states shivered.

13. In almost all responsible circles, the idea of a federation of
Europe of some kind, a United States of Europe if possible, came to
be a dominant preoccupation.

And now let us turn to that other and more powerful and perhaps
sinister and grasping League of Nations — ^the Soviet Union.

Chapter XXXVII
Stalin

The art of leadership is a serious matter. One must not lag
behind a movement, because to do so is to become isolated from
the masses. But one must not rush ahead, for to rush ahead is
to lose contact with the masses. He who wishes to lead a move-
ment must conduct a fight on two fronts — against those who
lag behind and those who rush ahead.

— Josef Stalin

No revolution can be made with silk gloves.

— ^JosEF Stalin

QTALIN is probably the most powerful single human being in the
^ world. Even dialectical materialism demands personality to assert
itself, as the case of Stalin proves. He is different from other dictators
because he is not only the undisputed leader of a national state but of
a movement, the Communist Internationale, which has roots in almost
all countries. Also he differs from Hitler and Mussolini in that he is
of the second generation of dictators, having taken over authority from
a predecessor, Lenin.

He was not appointed by Lenin to the job. Indeed, quite the con-
trary. Stalin was the man whom Lenin did not want to be his successor.
Lenin was quite explicit on this point. Listen:

^^Comrade Stalin is too rude. ... I propose to the comrades to find
a way of removing him from that position [secretary-general of the
party] and appointing another man who in all respects differs from
Stalin only in superiority — ^namely, more patient, more loyal, more
polite, and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc. . .

This was in 1924. Fifteen years later Stalin was extolled by his sub-
ordinates in terms much more extravagant than those which Lenin him-
self evoked. In the Soviet press you may find him fulsomely called
“Great” “Beloved,” “Bold,” “Wise,” “Inspirer,” “Genius.” Half a
dozen cities have been named for him, like Stalingrad, Stalinabad,

516

STALIN

517

Stalinogorsk, Stalinsk. In speeches he has been addressed by ordinarily
uneffusive folk as, “Our Best Collective Farmer Worker/' “Our
Shockworker, Our Best of Best," and “Our Darling, Our Guiding
Star." Celebrations have concluded with the words, “Long Live Our
Dear Leader, Our Warmly Beloved Stalin, Our Comrade, Our Friend,"
He has become practically an Oriental deity.’

Sources of Power

First, one may mention his durability and physique. He suffers from
a dilated heart, but otherwise' his physical strength and endurance are
enormous. He is no high-strung neurotic or somnambulist like Hitler,
nor is his command of physical power closely associated with emotion,
as is the case with other dictators. Stalin is about as emotional as a slab
of basalt. If he has nerves, they are veins in rock.

Then, consider his patience, his tenacity. His perseverance, as Walter
Duranty says, is “inhuman." He is a slow builder of bricks, so slow that
often his followers are impatient, because they do not see the outline
of the finished structure he is building. His line is undeviating; he
takes only “the long view."

Again, his shrewdness — cunning or craft are perhaps better words
to express this quality — ^is obvious. He is, of course, an Oriental;
moreover he admits it. “Welcome," he said to the first interviewer, a
Japanese, whom he ever received, “I too am an Asiatic." Years ago
he sought to suppress Lenin’s testament denigrating him. He had
not quite the power to do this. But presently the U.S.S.R. was flooded
with 500,000 copies of a photograph showing Stalin and Lenin sitting
on a bench together, conversing with earnest friendliness. Stalin’s
double campaign, first to rid himself of the Left opposition of Trotsky,
Zinoviev, and Kamenev, second the Right opposition of Bukharin,
Rykov, and Tomsky, was a triumph not only of extreme ruthlessness,
but of great imaginative shrewdness and subtlety.

When candor suits his purpose, no man can be more candid. He has
the courage to admit his errors, something few other dictators dare do.
In his article “Dizzy from Success” he was quite frank to admit that the
collectivization of the peasants had progressed too quickly. He wrote in
Leninism :

“The main thing in this matter is to have the courage to admit one’s
errors and to have the strength to correct them in the shortest possible
time. The fear of admitting one’s errors after the recent intoxication by

INSIDE EUROPE

518

successes, the fear of self-criticism, unwillingness to correct one’s errors
rapidly^ and decisively — ^that is the main difficulty.”

This book, Leninism, is one of the frankest — if long-winded — exposi-
tions of political philosophy ever written. In its 825 pages you may find
record of things good, bad, and indifferent in the Soviet Union in il-
limitable profusion. Stalin emphasizes the good, naturally, but he does
not conceal the bad. The book had sold over two million copies in the
Soviet Union.^

Again, there is his sense of detail, which is very great. His wary eye
penetrates, to the smallest elements in the national life, and in general
he tends to detail in a way neither Hitler nor Mussolini would dream
of doing. Hitler, for instance, refuses to read any of his mail, even
the most glowing samples. Stalin reads everything, down to the last
paragraph in the Pravda, His day begins with the perusal of local re-
ports, carefully sifted from all parts of the Soviet Union. W. H.
Chamberlin (cf. Russia's Iron Age, p. 187), certainly no friendly
critic, notes that Stalin, by personal intervention, remedied injustices
in spheres very far removed from his normal business.

In the summer of 1933 Stalin wanted to see the building of Mag-
nitogorsk, the industrial city created in Siberia during the Five-Year
Plan, dramatized and made colorful in the newspapers. He remembered
a bright feature-reporter on the Izvestia named Garry and asked what
had become of him. He was foimd in a concentration camp ! Stalin had
him released, sent him to write about Magnitogorsk.

During the February, 1934, congress of the communist party Stalin
was listening to a speech by his first assistant, Kaganovitch. He was
talking about certain text-books which had been unsatisfactory. Stalin
interrupted, ‘‘Not those text-books, but the loose-leaf text-books.”

Still again, one must mention his ability to handle men. He is a good
political tactician, a party boss and organizer par excellence. Friends
told me in Moscow in 1935 that Stalin possessed great magnetism, that
you felt his antennae as soon as he entered a room. His personal as
well as political intuition is considerable. Plenty of communists would
deny that he had any sense of human relationship — ^to put it mildly ! —
but he chooses men with great perspicacity.

He is no orator. His speeches are simple and businesslike but very

^ The complete works of Lenin, incidentally, in twenty-seven volumes, have sold
four million sets in the U.S,S.R. since publication.

STALIN

519

long. His writing, when he tackles the dreary wastes of Marxist dialec-
tics, particularly when he voices the ideological differences with the
opposition, is dull and tedious ; he sounds like an applicant for a Ph.D.
in a minor university. When, as in his recent address to graduates of
the Red Army college, he avoids philosophical issues, he is much more
successful — direct, simple, full of sense of the concrete. Generally, he
likes the question-and-answer method of exposition. His speeches are
like catechisms. And in style he aims to hit the broad level of the
masses.

His intelligence is wary, cautious, thorough, rather than acute or bril-
liant. Yet witness his talk with H. G. Wells, wherein he more than held
his own with that glib and eloquent interlocutor. And witness his re-
markable interview in 1927 with an American workmen’s delegation
when he answered questions for four solid hours, questions of great
diversity and difficulty. He talked strictly extemporaneously, but with
perfect organization of material, of a kind only possible to a man
completely sure of himself. The verbatim report, about 11,800 words,
comprises one of the most comprehensive and discerning statements
of Soviet aims ever made; it was a tour de force quite beyond the
capacity of any but an exceptionally intelligent man.

When the delegation, thoroughly exhausted, had concluded its queries,
Stalin asked if he might ask questions about America — ^and he did so
for two hours more. His questions were penetrating and showed con-
siderable knowledge of American conditions ; Stalin, single-handed, an-
swered the delegation’s questions much better than they replied to him.
During this six solid hours of talk, the telephone did not ring once;
no secretary was allowed to interrupt — ^another indication of Stalin’s
habit of utter concentration to the job in hand.

Another source of his power is, of course, zeal. Communism is
strength to Stalin, and his belief in it is that of the Pope m Jesus
Christ.

Again, there is the very important factor of ruthlessness. He is
extravagantly ruthless. It is stupid or silly to deny this. The Russian
Terror was a wholesale punitive assault on a class. Soviet Russia
differed from other dictatorships in that it assumed from the begin-
ning the necessity of destruction of class enemies. Stalin did not, at
the moment of crisis, flinch from obliterating several million peasants
by literally starving them to death. All governments, in the last analysis

INSIDE EUROPE

520

rule by force. In Soviet Russia force is applied directly, and with social
aims in view which are intended — ^by the communists — ^to benefit not
only 165,000,000 Russians, but the whole human race. The end justifies
the means, in the Soviet view. Stalin is perfectly frank about this. Lady
Astor asked him, ‘‘How long are you going to go on killing people?’’
Stalin replied, “As long as it is necessary.”

A Soviet worthy, absent from the U.S.S.R., was asked his opinion
of Stalin. He replied, “The man is just a little too bloody for me.”
Rare burst of indiscretion!

Still another source of power is his' early career. Almost alone,
Stalin^ had the guts to stay and work inside Russia after the col-
lapse of the revolution of 1905. The other revolutionaries scattered
into exile, and lived, like Lenin, in libraries or coffee-houses till 1917.
Stalin remained within Russia the whole time. He did the dirty work;
he was “the hall sweeper.” Thus he built up an immense acquaintance
with submerged revolutionaries, and was able to transform an under-
ground organization into his own party structure when he needed it.

Then there is the party and his control of it. The communist party
is no longer divided on questions of principle, as it was during the
Trotsky episode ; no discernible opposition remains ; Stalin is absolutely
its boss, its master. Discipline in the party is overwhelmingly severe;
and Stalin controls discipline. Party and state are one, and Stalin,
as Louis Fischer puts it, “controls every wheel and screw of the party
machine.”

Note well that Stalin created the importance of the post of party
secretary, not vice versa. Several men were secretaries of the party
before Stalin. One was Bogdanoff, now a nonentity; one was Kres-
tinsky, later an official in the foreign ministry, who was recently exe-
cuted. Stalin alone saw the advantages to be accrued from control of
the party mechanism; thus, as he packed each office with his men,
friends from underground days, his power grew.

Naturally Stalin’s espionage within the party was — ^and is — of the
best. The story is told that he turned to a comrade suffering from a
disease of a peculiarly private and secret nature. “Well,” Stalin greeted
him, “How’s your to-day?”

He is not a dictator of the first generation, I have noted, but the suc-
cessor to Lenin. His tactics have always been to use Lenin as a stick

* Cf . Duranty Reports Russia, p. 234.

STALIN

521

to beat opponents with. In his long struggle with Trotsky, Stalin pre-
tended never to put himself forward for his own sake, but only as the
"‘instrument of Lenin” ; he persistently accused Trotsky of “false Lenin-
ism,” the most heinous sin in Russia, thus doubly confounding him.
No man ever quoted Scripture to better purpose than Stalin quoted
Lenin. Mussolini and Hitler can plead only theniselves for justification;
Stalin always had the mighty shadow of Lenin for support.

This leads to another point. The basic strength of the Soviets is that
all the outside world is the enemy. Thus the Soviet state, thrown back
on itself, is close-knit and self-sufficient. It has its cohesive ideology,
the Marx-Lenin dogma, without possibility of deviation. Stalin, rep-
resenting himself as the authentic voice of dogma, is the mouthpiece
not merely of the masses in Russia, but of Russians vis-a-vis the hostile
world.

Job

Stalin holds no government post, except that since 1934 he has
been one of the thirty-seven members of the Presidium of the All-
Union Central Executive Committee. This is the keystone of what might
be called the Soviet parliament. The cabinet (council of people's com-
missars) is responsible to it — ^theoretically. But Stalin is not a cabinet
member, not a commissar.

He is no longer “secretary general” of the communist party, incident-
ally — ^as is generally assumed — ^but is merely one of five theoretically
equal party “secretaries,” the others being Kaganovitch, Zhdanov,
Ezhov, and Andreyev. He is, it goes without saying, one of the nine
members of the Politburo, the highest party organ, which controls
everything in Russia.

The Central Committee of the party, from which the secretaries and
members of the Politburo are drawn, could — ^in prinaple — dimiss Stalin.
He is theoretically subject to majority decisions of the Central Commit-
tee. In practice his dismissal is out of the question, since election of
the committee members is absolutely in his hands.

Party and state in Soviet Russia are, I have said, one; but Stalin
maintains rigid theoretical separation between party and governmental
functions. Lenin was not only head of the party but chairman of the
council of people's commissars — ^prime minister. Stalin has rejected this
coalescence. He prefers to remain in the background— the party boss.

522

INSIDE EUROPE

Boy of Tiflis

His real name is Yosif (Josef) Visarionovitch Dzhugashvili, and
was born in the town of Gora, near Tiflis, Georgia, in 1879. The lege
is that Lenin gave him his nickname, Stalin, which is the Russian wc
for “steel,” as tribute to his iron durability. In reality some anonymo
comrade suggested it as an “underground” name way back in 1910
1911, long before Lenin knew him well.

Stalin was the son of a cobbler who had been a peasant. The fam,
was miserably poor, probably as poor as Mussolini's, but Josef nevertf
less got an education. For four years, from the ages of fifteen to nir
teen, he attended the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tiflis, trainir
of all things, for the priesthood.

His father, like Hitler's, of blunt imagination, wanted him to folic
the parental vocation. But Stalin’s mother — ^apparently like Hitler's i
exceptional woman — ^refused to have him become a cobbler. She insist(
that Josef go to school. It is commonly thought that Stalin was expell<
from the Seminary for Marxist activities. This may not be so. Oi
story is that his mother withdrew him after four years because privatic
had hurt his health.

H. R, Knickerbocker has interviewed this old Georgian mother (
Stalin's, Ekaterina Dzhugashvili, who speaks hardly a word of Russia
She said that “Soso,” as she called him, had been quite “a good bo)
and she seemed quite bewildered at his immense success. Stalin fetche
her to Moscow some years ago. She spent an unhappy month in tl
Kremlin, puzzled, so the story went, at her boy's prominence, becaus
she could not discover what it was he “did” to earn a living! The
she retreated to the Tiflis hills, morose, content.

Georgians are not Russians. Even to-day Stalin speaks Russian wit
a hint of Georgian accent. The Georgian language not only diffei
from Russian as much, say, as English differs from Portuguese; eve
the alphabets are dissimilar. The Georgians are a southern race of com
plex Caucasian blood ; they are mountaineers, with the primitive defer
sive instincts of the frontiersman; tenacity, temper, are ingrained i
their physiognomy ; like Armenians, they have their own proud nations
history; they have purple-black hair, and eyes black as midnight.

Stalin's motivation to revolution came first from poverty, second fror
his experiences in the Seminary. He detested authority as it was voices
by the cunning, dogmatic priests, who combined parochial intolerano

STALIN

523

with the backwardness of the provincial Orthodox church. The years
in the Seminary were crucially important in the formative period of
Stalin's life. He left the Seminary, met Marxist friends — ^and his long
revolutionary career began.

Those submerged nineteen years, from 1898 to 1917, were years of
incessant, overwhelming labor, always to the same end — revolution ; of
patient, tenacious establishment of an organization; of pain, cruelty,
persecution, arrest. Both Hitler and Mussolini have seen the inside of
jails. But Stalin was much more r^al a jailbird. Five times he was caught
by the Tsar's police, five times exiled. Four times, a veritable Houdini,
he escaped; the 1917 revolution liberated him from the fifth imprison-
ment, when he was incarcerated above the Arctic Circle.

Stalin was an actual terrorist, personally. The party needed money and
undertook a policy of “expropriations," raids on banks which were
simon-pure robberies, nothing more, nothing less. As member of the
Tiflis party committee he was partly responsible for an outrage in 1907
wherein some twenty persons were killed : his men bombed a shipment
of currency, and got away with $75,000. The bloodshed was criticized
by Stalin's superiors, and on Lenin's insistence he was expelled from
the party for a short period.

He found time — ^between jail sentences and exile — for much activity
of less tumultuous nature. At Baku, on the Caspian Sea, he edited a
Bolshevik paper, Vremta, in the Georgian language. He went to Stock-
holm, Cracow, and Prague, to attend party congresses. He had man-
aged to write a book. Socialism and the National Question, as early as
1912. He was leader at this time of the Bolshevik section of the social
democratic party in the Duma, and an editor of Pravda, the party news-
paper; then in 1913 he was arrested and sent to his last exile.

All this was preparation. In 1917 real life began. The revolution, over-
night, transformed his function — ^and that of thousands of others — from
conspiracy to organization, from insurrections to administration. He was
a member of the Politburo from the moment of its creation, on October
10, 1917; other members, besides Lenin, were Trotsky, Zinoviev, Ka-
menev, Sokolnikov, Bubnov. Also he held two cabinet portfolios when
the government was organized : commissar for workers and peasants in-
spection, and commissar for nationalities.

He was not so active as Trotsky during the civil war period, though
he was a member of the revolutionary military committee, and saw
service both in the Ukraine and in Petrograd against Yudenitch. In

INSIDE EUROPE

524

1921 Lenin, little dreaming what use Stalin would make of it, gave
him the secretary-generalship of the party. His main work was then
in the sphere of nationalities. As a non-Russian, he was peculiarly
fitted for this task. Soviet Russia was a melange of at least one hun-
dred quite separate races and nationalities, and the job was to combine
them into a stable unity while conceding some measure of provincial
autonomy, at least in spirit. Stalin, under Lenin, invented the idea
of the U.S.S.R. — ^the convenient device by which "‘independent’’ and
“autonomous” republics became the Soviet “Union,” surrendering cen-
tral authority to Moscow, retaining local administrative privileges.

Stalm was jealous of Trotsky from the beginning, and they came into
conflict early. Duranty records that Stalin, mending a breach in the
front, shot a group of officers for inefficiency, and that Trotsky, as
supreme War Lord, telegraphed in protest. Stalin scrawled across the
telegram, “Pay no attention,” and left it to molder in the archives.

Another anecdote of this period shows him in different mood. He
was reviewing troops near Petrograd. A sullen soldier refused to salute.
Stalin questioned him and the man pointed first to his own feet, wrapped
in coarse burlap, soaked in snow and dirt, then at Stalin’s substantial
boots. Without a word Stalm took his boots off, tossed them to the
soldier, insisted on donning the soldier’s wet and stinking rags — ^and
continued to wear them till Lenin himself made him resume normal
footgear.

Stalin, says Duranty, was picked by Lenin as one of his successors
because he knew the Georgian could endure. The proverb in those days
said, “Lenin trusts Stalin ; Stalin trusts no one.” Some authorities, Paul
Scheffer among them, assert that Lenin and Stalin broke about four
months before Lenin’s death, because Lenin distrusted his ambition, and
thought that Stalin was already intriguing to supersede him. Certainly
we have seen that Lenin, in his testament, showed his disapproval of
some aspects of Stalin’s character. “This cook,” he wrote, “will make
too hot a stew.”

The Georgian began to act the moment that Lenin died. He and Zino-
viev carried Lenin’s coffin. This was in 1924. It took Stalin just five
years to perfect his organization, unmercifully weed out heretical op-
ponents — ^whom he attacked by accusing them of a deviation from the
sacred “party line,” which he alone was competent to interpret — and
establish himself as xmdisputed dictator of the U.S.S.R.

STALIN

525

The Struggle with Trotsky

Stalin denies (cf. Leninism, I, p. 377) that his differences with
Trotsky were personal. Nevertheless, personal differences occurred. The
two leaders cordially disliked each other. They came from different
worlds, and not even the bridge of Marx could' link them. Stalin called
Trotsky an aristocrat and an actor. And Trotsky was an aristocrat, in
all save the social sense, i.e., he had brains, he had courage, and he had
style. Trotsky called Stalin a boor, treacherous, barbarous, cruel, cor-
rupt.

It is an odd fact that such a bourgeois and “trivial” conception as
personal hatred, based on the irrationality of passion, should have been
an important factor in the history of the Russian revolution. But it was
so — ^though, of course, the personal considerations were buttressed by
other factors. Trotsky detested Stalin so heartily that he studiously in-
sulted him in public ; for instance, in committee meetings he would osten-
tatiously pick up a newspaper and begin to read to himself whenever
Stalin made a speech.

The difference in their characters was, of course, profound. Stalin, a
passionate politician, above all a creature of committees; Trotsky, a
lone-wolf, a violent individualist, who for twenty years could not bear
to shackle himself with allegiance to either the Bolshevisk or Menshevik
divisions in the party. Stalin, patient as an icon ; Trotsky, vivacious as
a satyr. Stalin, immobile, silent, cautious; Trotsky, a lively, frank, and
inveterate conversationalist. Stalin, a bomb-thrower, literally; Trotsky,
horrified by sporadic violence. Stalin, a hard-headed practical wire-
puller, unyieldingly jealous of his career; Trotsky, lover of the abstract,
impulsive, vain. Stalin, a supreme organizer; Trotsky, a bad politician,
incapable of compromise, very hard to work with. Observe their smiles.
Stalin smiles like a tiger who has just swallowed the canary. Trotsky
smiles brightly and spontaneously like a child. Observe their escapes
from Siberia. Stalin went about it somberly, efficiently, with methodical
coldness; Trotsky — ^puff! — ^has disappeared into clear air; he escapes
like Ariel.

Above and beyond their personal conflict was divergence in political
views of extreme importance. The passion of each came to embody car-
dinally opposed theories of the operation of the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s
“Left Opposition” arose out of the doctrine of “permanent revolution.”
He did not believe, as Stalin did, that socialism could succeed in a single

INSIDE EUROPE

526

state. He believed that the Marxist regime could maintain itself in Russia
only if permanent, progressive revolution took place outside.

The Trotskiests were horrified at the way things went after Lenin’s
death. They thought that the socialization of the U.S.S.R. was going on
far too slowly. They feared that Lenin’s tactical and temporary conces-
sion to capitalist forces, 'the N E.P. (New Economic Policy) would con-
tinue indefinitely; they thought that communism in Russia itself, with
such meager spoils of victory, would perish without help from proleta-
rian revolution in the external world.

Stalin took the opposite view. He said, in effect, “You comrades out-
side cool your heels for a couple of decades, then we’ll get around to
you.” Trotsky said, “Join your Russian comrades in revolution and free
yourself from your chains at once.” Stalin said, “Russia first. When
we get our state in order, then comes your turn.” Trotsky said, “What-
ever country you live in comes first.” Russia, as Stalin saw it, was
settling down to the prosaic ardors of married life. But Trotsky, an
incorrigible romantic, wanted permanent revolution as a perpetual
honeymoon.

Stalin broke Trotsky and his friends by the same method he subse-
quently employed to break the “Right Opposition” (which thought that
the socialization of Russia was going at too rapid a pace). He (i) con-
trolled the party machine, (2) his interpretation of Leninism made all
his opponents heretics, and therefore punishable.

Stalin’s detestation of Trotsky led him to exaggerated meanness in
revenge. Yet his extirpation of Trotsky’s name from the official records
and schoolbooks, so that unborn generations may hardly know his name,
is not as complete as one is led to believe. In his October Revolution,
which is purchasable anywhere in Russia, Stalin pays tribute, albeit
grudgingly, to his enemy. “Let us admit this, it is impossible to deny
that Comrade Trotsky fought well at the time of October” (p. 72).

Stalin hated Trotsky partly, in the complicated way of human beings,
because he, Stalin, owed him so much: he stole part of his program.
Trotsky advocated super-industrialization in the manner of the Five-
Year plan as far back as 1921, and he wanted to expel the kulaks (rich
farmers) in 1925, a task which Stalin did not set himself till almost
five years later. But that was the trouble. Trotsky, impulsive, demanded
these things prematurely, at the wrong time ; Stalin had the strength to
wait.

And Trotsky never seemed to realize that when Stalin said he could

STALIN

527

build socialism in a single country, the country was Russia, which is
not a country at all — ^but a continent. Nor did it occur to Trotsky ap-
parently that far and away the best single advertisement for world
communism, in the future, would be a Russia which was successful,
stable, safe.

The Iron Will of Stalin

Of course there was a famine. None can deny this any longer. It
occurred in the spring of 1933, ^in the great gram-producing areas of
the U.S.S.R., the North Caucasus, and Ukraine. Communists, after pre-
liminary hesitancy, now admit the fact of the famine, though in circum-
locutory jargon. For instance. Miss Anna Louise Strong writes {New
Republic, August 7, 1935), 'There was a serious grain shortage in the
1932 harvest due chiefly to inefficiencies of the organizational period of
the new large-scale mechanized farming among peasants unaccustomed
to machines.’' This is quite a mouthful — z, mouthful that the peasants
didn’t get.

The chief point about the famine is not — ^it might be said — ^that sev-
eral million people died. Chamberlin puts the mortality as high as five
or six million. This is too high, other authorities believe. The point is
that the Soviet government was engaged in a tremendous, epochal
struggle to socialize the land, for what they claimed to be the eventual
good of the peasants; the peasants, however, resisted and — ^terribly
enough — suffered. To balk the government, they refused to harvest
grain. Therefore they did not have enough to eat. And died.

The real story of the famine is briefly this. The Five-Year plan
included "collectivization” of the peasantry. Russia, overwhelmingly an
agrarian country, contained in 1927 almost 25,000,000 peasant holdings ;
Stalin’s plan was to unite them into socialized collective farms. The
peasants would turn over implements and livestock to a farm manager,
and work in common on comparatively large rather than very small
holdings, assisted by tractors furnished by the state. This was the idea.
On it, the future of socialism in the U.S.S.R. depended.

What happened was that the peasants, bitterly indignant, staged two
major resistances to the immense forcible process of collectivization.
First, they slaughtered their livestock, rather than turn it over to the
collectives. It was an extraordinary and tragic event — ^though not so
tragic as the human starvation later. There was no organization among
the peasants, no communication ; yet in hundreds of villages, separated

INSIDE EUROPE

528

by hundreds of miles, a simultaneous destruction of animals began.
Rather than turn over their precious pigs, sheep, cattle, to the collective
authorities, the peasants murdered them.

The cost was terrible. Stalin — four years late — ^admitted it. The agra-
rian economy of the Soviet Union suffered a blow from which it cannot
fully recover till about 1940 ; it will take till then to replenish the slaugh-
tered stock. For, once the killing began, it progressed till about fifty per
cent of the animals in the Soviet Union were killed. Official figures
admit that the number of horses in the country diminished from 33,-

500.000 in 1928 to 19,600,000 in 1932; the number of cattle from

70.500.000 to 40,700,000; sheep and goats from 146,700,000 to 52,-
100,000; pigs from 25,900,000 to 11,600,000.®

The peasants, stunned by this catastrophe, sank into temporary stupor.
The government — ^when the worst of the damage was done — ^retreated
hastily. Probably Stalin had not realized the formidable extent of the
slaughter until it was too late. , . . The tempo of collectivization had
been far too rapid. The plan called for full collectivization only after
ten years, but within two years, in 1930, sixty-five per cent of all the
farms had been collectivized. So the pace was toned down.

Even so, in 1932, the peasants, stiffening into a final vain protest,
rebelled again. As if by underground agreement, another psychic epi-
demic spread through the rich fields of the Caucasus and Ukraine. The
farmers, those still outside the collectives, were paid miserable prices;
either they could buy no manufactured goods at all, or goods only of
indifferent quality. They hit on a plan. They had sowed the crop, which
was abundant ; but they decided not to harvest all of it. They harvested
exactly what they calculated they would themselves need during the win-
ter, and left the rest to rot. “What was the use of slaving to produce a
handsome crop, if the state simply seized it all

This was, of course, mutiny. It was not only defiance of Stalin ; it
was a threat to starve him into submission. The Soviet government
needed grain to distribute to the industrial regions, the great cities; it
needed grain for export, to pay for the machinery it had to import for
the Five-Year plan.

Even the farmers already in the collectives let their grain rot. There
were few communist overseers, few trained and loyal farm managers.
Word got to Moscow that the harvest, which should have been hand-

* Premier Molotov’s speech at the 1934 party congress. (Cf. Socialism Victorious

P. 394.)

STALIN

529

some, was largely lost. Stalin saw that this was a major crisis. If the
peasants were permitted to get away with this, the revolution was beaten.
(‘‘Obsolete classes don’t voluntarily disappear,” he told Wells.) He had
to act. And he acted.

Government grain collectors descended on the farms, tall with weeds,
and seized that small share of the crop that the peasants had saved for
their own use ! One by one, they visited every holding, and took every
lick of grain due the government in taxes. If a man’s normal crop was,
say, sixty bushels, the tax might be twenty bushels. But the farmer had
only harvested, say, twenty-five ’bushels. So when the government took
twenty, the farmer and his family had only five — ^instead of twenty-five
— ^to live on the whole winter and spring.

Russian economy is still extremely primitive. The question of grain,
of bread, is a matter of life and death. When there was no grain left,
the people began to die. The government might have diverted some grain
from the cities — ^though that was a pinched, hungry year everyhere —
to feed the peasants. But the government did not do so. Stalin decided
that the peasants must pay the penalty for their rebellion. They had re-
fused, blindly, stupidly, to provide grain; very well, let them starve.
And they starved.

Meantime, the kulaks had been liquidated by a more direct process.
These were peasants of more than average industry or ability or wealth;
the capitalist farmers, ‘‘class enemies on the agrarian front.” In 1928
there were 750,000 people officially classed as kulaks in the Soviet Union,
To-day there are none. They were rooted out like trees, packed into
prison trains, dispatched to labor camps in far parts of the country,
put to forced labor on building railways, digging canals.

The famine broke the back of peasant resistance in the U.S.S.R. Since
the famine collectivization has proceeded slowly but steadily. From
1930 to 1935 another twenty-five per cent of the land was socialized. All
but a small fraction of the best arable land in Russia is now organized
into about 250,000 farms. The peasants tried to revolt. The revolt might
have brought the Soviet Union down. But it collapsed on the iron will
of Stalin. The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.

Stalin the Human Being

Let no one think that Stalin is a thug. It would be idle to pretend that
he could take a chair in fine arts at Harvard ; nevertheless his learning

INSIDE EUROPE

530

is both broad and deep, especially in philosophy and history. One is in-
stinctively tempted to consider this reticent Georgian as a roughneck,
a man of instincts and muscle, not of brains. But his speeches quote
Plato and Don Quixote ; he knew about the monkey trial at Da3rton and
the composition of Lloyd George's shadow-cabinet and the unionization
of workers in America ; In his talk with Wells he showed as much knowl-
edge of Cromwell and the Chartists as Wells himself.

In 1933 he shocked and horrified a deputation of Bolshevik writers
by telling them their work was rubbish, because it had no broad basis in
general culture. "'Read Shakespeare, Goethe, and the other classics, as
I do,” he said.

Nor are his manners bad. He sees visitors only very rarely, but one
and all they report his soberness, his respectful attention to their ques-
tions, his attempt to put them at their ease. His speeches are full of a
curious sort of sardonic courtliness ; for instance he refers to capitalists
usually as '^Messieurs the Bourgeoisie/'^ He restrains his personal ap-
pearances to the minimum; once, during the crucial period of the Five-
Year plan, he made no speech or public appearance for eighteen months.

He has a sense of humor, though it is heavy to Western ears; that he
has a sense of humor at all differentiates him from Hitler or Mussolini.
Addressing the 1930 congress of the party, he ticked off the Right
Opposition of Bukharin and Rykov by asserting that if Bukharin saw
a cockroach he proceeded at once to smell catastrophe, foreseeing the
end of the Soviet Union in one month. “Rykov supported Bukharin's
theses on the subject,” said Stalin, “with the reservation, however, that
he had a very serious difference with Bukharin, namely that the Soviet
Government will perish, in his opinion, not in one month, but in one
month and two days.”

At the 1934 congress he took time out to deal with those who indulge
in the great Russian habit of talkativeness:

“I had a conversation with one such comrade, a very respected com-
rade, but an incorrigible chatterbox, who was capable of submerging any
living cause in a flood of talk. Well, here is the conversation:

I: How are you getting on with the sowing?

He : With the sowing, Comrade Stalin ? We have mobilized ourselves.

I : Well, and what then ?

He: We have put the question bluntly.

* Incidentally, an odd point, he sometimes speaks of himself in the third person.
Cf. LemrUsm, I, 300, and II, 225.

STALIN 531

I : And what next ?

He : There is a turn, Comrade Stalin ; soon there will be a turn,

I: But still?

He : We can observe some progress.

I; But for all that, how are you getting on with the sowing?

He : Nothing has come of the sowing as yet^ Comrade Stalin.*’

Stalin makes occasional pretenses to humility. When Wells asked him
what he was doing to change the world, he answered mildly, ‘'Not so
very much.” And he concluded the interview by saying, "Much more
could have been done had we Bolsheviks been cleverer.”®

Stalin has, however, permitted and encouraged his own virtual deifica-
tion. Pictures of him share the place of honor everywhere with Lenin,
His photograph leaps at one from buildings in Moscow, illuminated at
night like theater advertisements. Worship of him is Byzantine. Ob-
viously he could stop the public expression of adulation very easily. He
does not do so. One reason may be his shrewd Orientalism ; the flattery,
the pictures, are a good political weapon ; he knows the Russians under-
stand a master. Or perhaps he likes them.

The blackest thing against Stalin — ^until the invasion of Finland —
was of course the great purge that began in 1936, and ran like wildfire
over the Soviet Union, killing thousands as it went.

Private Life

Stalin lives, as is well known, in the Kremlin when he is in Moscow.
The Kremlin is not a building, but a compound, a walled fortress, con-
taining forty or fifty buildings, churches, barracks, gardens. Stalin lives
in three rooms. He does not, however, as is generally believed, work in
the Kremlin. The legend that Stalin, a virtual prisoner, stays always
within Kremlin walls, is without much foundation. For a long time he
Worked daily outside the Kremlin, in the building of the central com-
mittee of the party, on Staraya Ploshad, in the busiest part of Moscow.

Also he spends much time in the country, at his datcha, or country
villa. This is about an hour from Moscow, in the region of Usova-
Arkangelskaya, near the Moskva River. The house belonged to a former
millionaire, a gold miner and merchant, who had a persecution complex,
and therefore surrounded the ten-acre estate with a heavy wall. Stalin

® Duranty says that Stalin made him change a phrase in their interview, “inheritor
of the mantle of Lenin,” to “faithful servant of Lenin.” A dictator Stalin certainly
is, but not a flaming egoist.

532 INSIDE EUROPE

has a good, healthy persecution complex himself. He has not tom
down the wall.

The region of the datcha is, indeed, heavily guarded, and so is the
Moscow road leading to it. Stalin usually drives there in three cars,
Packards, going very fast ; he sits as a rule with the chauflEeur, and the
position of his car in the procession is changed daily. Picnickers and
sightseers in the vicinity are told politely to move on.

Yet Stalin is not, on the whole, so drastically guarded as Hitler or
Mussolini. He exposes himself a good deal more than they do. He has
several times been seen returning to the Kremlin from the Opera on
foot, walking with friends through the crowded square. And at least
twice a year, on May i and November 7, the two great Soviet holidays,
Stalin stands on the tomb of Lenin and literally several million people
pass him at a range of about thirty yards.

He cares nothing for pomp or ceremony. He does not wear a uni-
form, but a dark olive-green jacket buttoned at the neck, riding-breeches,
and boots. When he goes out, he wears a cap with a visor. Not an official
uniform, this costume has nevertheless been widely imitated throughout
most of Russia; the high people in the party, all the sycophants and
flatterers, have faithfully copied it, and wear it as a proof of devotion
to tlie boss.

Stalin’s usual routine is to work hard for about a week or longer,
then go to the datcha for two or three days to rest. He has few relaxa-
tions, but he likes opera and ballet, and attends the Bolshoi Theater
often; sometimes a movie catches his fancy, and he saw Chapayev, a
film of the civil wars, four times. He reads a great deal, and plays chess
occasionally. He smokes incessantly, and always a pipe; the gossip in
Moscow is that he likes Edgeworth tobacco, but is a little hesitant to
smoke publicly this non-Soviet product. At dinner he keeps his pipe lit
next to his plate, puffs between courses. He is fond of alcohol, especially
brandy, and holds his liquor well.

His attitude to sex is quite normal and healthy. He has married twice.
He is supposed now to be living with the sister of Kaganovitch, his
first assistant. He is rather naive, apparently. One evening, dropping in
to see his friend Karl Radek, he noted on the table a volume by a Ger-
man named Fuchs, called Sit fen Geschichte (History of Morals), a
pseudo-scientific picture-book. Stalin turned the pages idly, saw one of
the more fantastic illustrations. He turned to his friend: ^Tell me,
Radek: do people really do this sort of thing?”

STALIN

533

Records of his first wife are lost in the mists of pre-revolutionary
days. She died of pneumonia in 1917. In those days love was more
or less an instrument of the class war; the old Bolsheviks paid little
attention to the forms of marriage. By this first wife, Stalin had a son,
now about twenty-five. He has not turned out well. He did badly at
technical school — ^the rumor has it that he spent most of his time play-
ing billiards with a classmate, the son of Menzhinsky, late head of the
G.P.U. — ^and Stalin, annoyed, packed him off to work in a factory in
Tiflis.

In 1919 Stalin dropped in to see an old revolutionary friend in Lenin-
grad, Sergei Alliluiev (the name means Hallelujah), a locksmith. He
met his daughter, a seventeen-year-old girl Nadyezhda (Nadya), and
married her. By her he had two children, a boy, Vassily, now fourteen,
and a girl, Svetlana, twelve. Mrs. Stalin entered the Promakademia, or
school for industrial arts, in 1929, studying the manufacture of artificial
silk. There was no publicity attached to this; she worked like anyone
else, and even battled her way into the ordinary street-cars, instead of
using a Kremlin Packard. Her ambition was to become head of the
rayon trust.

On November 8, 1932, in seemingly mysterious circumstances, Nad-
yezhda Alliluiev Stalin died suddenly. She had been seen, apparently in
normal health, at the Opera only a few days before. The news of her
death was announced without elaboration, and she was buried (not,
curiously enough, cremated) in the churchyard of the Convent of New
Virgins.

Reports were quick to spread that she tasted all food prepared for
Stalin and had been poisoned. But the facts seem to be that she had
been having acute intestinal pains for several days, and had neglected
them. She did not wish to trouble her husband with what she thought
was a minor ailment. Probably she was somewhat afraid of him. , . •
She sought to hide her pain, keep the tough spirit of the Bolsheviks.
The ailment was appendicitis, and by the time she admitted she was
ill it was too late, and she died of peritonitis.

Stalin’s relation to his younger children is quite paternal, but he has
taken pains that in school they are treated exactly as other children.
He has never visited the school, which is one of three model schools in
Russia; it is called School No. 25, and is on Pimenovsky Street, just
oflf Tverskaya. The boy had seven fairs, five goods, on his last report-
card; no very goods or excellents. His best subject was literature.

534

INSIDE EUROPE

Money, Attitudes, Friends

Stalin’s salary is about i,ooo rubles per month, the equivalent of
which, in Russia in 1939, was about $200. He is completely uninterested
in money. Like all the Sqviet leaders he is a poor man; no financial
scandal has ever touched any of them. Salaries of communists are
adjusted by category, this system having replaced the former rule
whereby no man in the party could earn more than 225 rubles per
month. There is no upward limit; the average is 600. No communist
may accept a salary for more than one post, no matter how many
he holds ; and no member of the party is allowed in theory at least to
retain royalties from books.

On the other hand, Stalin could, like the Tsars, eat off gold plate if
he so wished. There is no wealth in all of Russia that he could not have,
if he wanted it. He lives modestly, but his datcha is the Soviet equiva-
lent of the country home of an American millionaire. He has servants,
motor-cars, books.

His attitude toward conventional religion is purely negative. His re-
ligion, like that of all the dictators, is his work; communism is enough
faith for him. Stalin has said, '‘The party cannot be neutral toward re-
ligion, because religion is something opposite to science.” Nevertheless,
it is noteworthy that he permitted his wife an almost orthodox religious
burial. He is the only dictator who may be said thoroughly to have read
the Bible; he did so, of course, in his seminary days.

He has few friends. Voroshilov, Kaganovitch, and Zhdanov are the
three closest. He is on thee-and-thou footing with old colleagues in the
party, but it is hard to address him intimately because there is no
ordinary diminutive for Yosif, his Christian name. People who know
him well call him "Yosif Visarionovitch” ; others simply say Tovarish
(Comrade) Stalin. He has no title.

He seldom sees outsiders. William C. Bullitt, the American ambassa-
dor, dined with him once. Until Bullitt arrived in Moscow, Stalin had
never received a foreign diplomat ; even Lord Chilston, the then British
ambassador, had not met him until Anthony Eden’s visit in the spring
of 1935. Retiring, uncommunicative, in twenty years he has seen only
seven journalists — ^two Germans, two Japanese, three Americans — for
formal interviews.

He "received” Bullitt in typical and indirect fashion, Voroshilov had
arranged a dinner-party, and Stalin simply dropped in. He was cheery

STALIN

53 S

and cordial, toasted everybody around the table, talked with great in-
telligence and knowledge of America, and relaxed, smoking his pipe,
while the commissars sat at piano, singing songs almost like brothers in
a fraternity.

Lately Stalin has given evidence that he may come out of his shell.
He visited the new subway unannounced; he spoke over the radio re-
cently for the first time; he has even kissed babies— final concession
to popularity— in the Culture Park. When he received Eden, Laval,
and Benes in the spring and summer of 1935, he jointly signed the
communiques with Molotov, Which was unprecedented.

Also, Stalin has taken a new tack lately, as the champion of men as
men— even non-party men— provided they follow his line. In May,
193s, he denounced the ‘'heartless bureaucracy” and said that "first
of all we must learn to value people, to value cadres, to value every
worker capable of benefiting our common cause. It is time to realize
that of all the valuable capital the world possesses, the most valuable
and decisive is people.”

As a symbol of the former contempt for men, which he deplored,
though his purges were to decimate the party, Stalin told this little
story:

‘T recall an incident in Siberia, where I was at one time in exile.
It was in the^ spring, at the time of the spring floods. About thirty men
went to the river to pull out timber which had been carried away by the
vast, swollen river. Towards evening they returned to the village, but
with one comrade missing. When asked where the thirtieth man was,
they unconcernedly replied that the thirtieth man had 'remained there.'
To niy question, 'How do you mean, remained there?' they replied with
the same unconcern, 'Why ask — drowned, of course.' And thereupon
one of them began to hurry away, saying, 'I have got to go and water
the mare.' When I reproached them for having more concern for ani-
mals than for men, one of them, amid the general approval of the rest,
said, 'Why should we be concerned about men? We can always make
men. But a mare — ^just try and make a mare.' ”

But this concession to humanity came very late, after terrible strug-
gles, terrible sacrifices. If Stalin can relax now and search for human
values, well and good. But his historical mission was quite different.
Stalin is the man who took over the Russian revolution and made
it work. Human values disappeared. He is the creator of the "Iron
Age,” the director of the Five-Year plan, the man who, by ruthlessly
industrializing Russia, made the beginnings of socialism possible in a
single state.

Chapter XXXVIII
Men Around Stalin

Among the masses of the people, we {the communists) are
but drops in the ocean, and we will he able to govern only when
we properly express that which the people appreciate. With-
out this the communist party will nDt lead the proletariat, the
proletariat will not take the lead of the masses, and the whole
machine will fall to pieces.

— Lenin

The mills of our revolution grind well.

— Stalin

y ou may not know the names of the men in this chapter, these men
around Stalin. They are not morphiniacs, hysterics, thugs, adven-
turers for personal power, cynics, or neurotic misfits. But Kaganovitch
is almost as important to Russia as Goering is to Germany ; Molotov,
Zhdanov, Voroshilov, are as noteworthy in their way as Goebbels,
Himmler, or Hess. They have no genius for personal publicity. Their
personalities hardly exist. They are servants of the all-powerful state;
they exist only for their jobs, and they do their jobs extremely well.

Many of these men — ^who rule one-sixth the land surface of the globe
— ^were workmen with their hands, manual laborers, fifteen or twenty
years ago. Of the ten present members of the Politburo, four never
went to school at all; not one has a university education. This may
account, incidentally, for much of the subsidiary confusion in Russian
business affairs — ^the red tape, bureaucracy, lack of technique, lack of
facility. Even so, a neutral diplomat in Moscow, in a position to know,
told me that he thought the members of the Politburo were personally
as able as any governing body in the world.

The lives of most of Stalin's men follow a similar pattern. They were
workmen who turned revolutionary, and all but the youngest of them
have a history, like Stalin, of underground political activity. The most
important fact in their lives was the date when they entered the com-

536

MEN AROUND STALIN

537

munist party; as a rule, their hierarchical position depends on this.
Several have been in prison, and their prison sentences are proud badges
of distinction.

*^Their penal servitude is not a stigma,’’ wrote a well-informed anony-
mous commentator,^ ‘‘but a token of their ne\y nobility. They are proud
of their criminal record as the emblem of their new aristocracy. Yet the
leaders of the Bolshevist regime are ‘good’ men in the most ominous
meaning of that word. They are fanatics with a single-track mind. . . .
The comparison with the early Church militant and the Jesuit order is
irresistible. The Bolsheviks are latter-day saints and crusaders, but of
a material not a spiritual world, and they are the most thoroughgoing
reformers and moralists in history — ^in their own way. Some of them
drink, some have mistresses, but their morality is of another kind. They
are the first autocratic rulers in history who do not use their power for
personal profit. They do not graft ; those who do get shot. They have no
castles, no titles, no purple robes ; they live in a couple of rooms on a
standard below that of an American bricklayer; they are pledged to
personal poverty and service.”

Of course, careerism may become a career in itself ; abolish property
as a social motive, and a substitute immediately arises — ^power. And
power is dear to all men, even Bolsheviks. Instead of wealth, com-
munists are apt to measure ambition and accomplishment in terms of
jobs, influence, power.

From the Central Committee of the party, numbering seventy-seven
members and sixty-eight alternates, the Politburo is chosen, its supreme
organ’l There are nine regular members of the Politburo, four alternates.
All are more or less friends ; they have a common background, common
aims; and they are the central directorate of the Soviet Union. Tech-
nically, Stalin has no more voice than other members.

Members of the Politburo put on a sort of show at every congress
of the party. They take the stage and hold a public meeting before the
audience of party members. Within the iron circumscription of “the
party line,” argument, disagreement, discussion may be very lively.
Members of the Politburo interrupt each other vigorously ; the audience
is entitled to heckle, and often does. The analogy would be for a British
cabinet meeting to be held in the House of Commons, with back-benchers
entitled to join free and vehement discussion.

The Politburo is not, however, the cabinet, A Politburo member may

^ In Not to Be Repeated^ New York, 1932.

INSIDE EUROPE

538

also be a cabinet member. But most cabinet ministers have not reached
the dizzy height of Politburo membership. Cabinet ministers are govern--
ment officials; Politburo members are party officials, though every
Politburo man is a member of the Central Executive Committee of the
U.S.S.R. too. Cabinet ministers in the Soviet Union have purely ad-
ministrative functions, with no voice in the general sphere of political
policy and management, unless they happen to be members of the
Politburo also.

One Politburo member is Georgian (Stalin) ; one, Mikoyan, is an
Armenian; one, Kaganovitch, is a Jew; one alternate member (Beria)
is a Georgian; the others are Russians of various breeds. It is fre-
quently alleged that Russia is run by Jews. Nothing could be farther
from the truth. All the Jews except Kaganovitch (a comparative
newcomer) are exiled or dead : Trotsky (whose real name was Bron-
stein), Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), Kamenev (Rosenfeld), and the old
intellectuals of similar stamp. Litvinov is a Jew, but he was never a
member of the Politburo.

The Politburo is assembled with great care and skill, so that its mem-
bers form a sort of interlocking net over Soviet activity. No neater sys-
tem of ramifying authority has ever been devised. This was part of
Stalinas slow, laborious effort to get all the threads in his own hands.
Suppose we go through the Politburo man by man, and see how it is
^‘packed.”

First there is Molotov. He is president of the council of people’s
commissars, in other words prime minister, and, since Litvinov was
ousted, foreign minister also. Thus the functions of the cabinet and
foreign office are focused in the Politburo. He is also president of
STO, the Council of Labor and Defense, probably the most powerful
official government organ in the U.S.S.R.

Next there is Kalinin. He is the president of the Central Executive
Committee of the R.S.F.S.R. (Russia proper) and senior president of
the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. — ^thus the top dig-
nitary of the country, its nominal "'president.” He carries to the Polit-
buro the outward symbol of governmental authority.

Next— my order is arbitrary — ^is Voroshilov, the minister of war.
He brings the Red Army to the Politburo. Then comes Kaganovitch,
who has held every sort of job, and who is now commissar for heavy
industry, which likewise fits neatly into the Politburo fold. Mikoyan
is fuel commissar, as well as being vice prime minister. Andreyev,

MEN AROUND STALIN 539

predominantly a party man (though for a time he was commissar of

railways), is, like Stalin, a secretary of the party, and — ^if necessary!

can bring the machine itself into line. L. P. Beria, an alternate, is the
new head of the G.P.U.— the secret police. And a man of great potential
importance, Andrey Alexandrovitch Zhdanov, who is nowadays spoken
of as Stalin’s eventual successor, is a member of the executive com-
mittee of the Commtmist Internationale, the Comintern; this brings
the Politburo into external party affairs.

One point about the Politburo is the comparative youth of all the
members except Kalinin, who is sixty-four. Kaganovitch is forty-six,
Voroshilov fifty-eight, Molotov forty-nine, Andreyev and Mikoyan
forty-three, and Zhdanov only forty-two. The average is well under
fifty. It is the youngest group of men of such illimitable power in the
world.

White Hope of the Jews

At one time the greatest shortage in the Soviet Union was not of
bread, or houses, or newsprint, or textile fabrics — ^but of railway
tickets. A British diplomat I know was stranded in the Crimea and
unable to return to Moscow for some days, simply because he could
not buy transportation on the trains. The reason was that Lazar Moisey-
vitch Kaganovitch had been appointed by Stalin to reform the Soviet
railway system, expedite essential shipments of grain and freight.
And Kaganovitch did the job with his accustomed thoroughness.

The railways were in such a mess because the rolling stock was anti-
quated, trackage — over such enormous distances — ^was insufficient, and
the personnel slovenly. In 1934 there were 62,000 ‘‘mishaps,” some of
them serious wrecks, on the Soviet railway system. Engineers and
switchmen convicted of carelessness were shot. This was no remedy —
it simply made the survivors nervous and caused more wrecks — ^and
Kaganovitch stopped it. During the great purges in 1936 and 1937,
however, shooting began again.

It is quite a habit of Stalin to give Kaganovitch all the hardest jobs.
He was appointed head of the Moscow Soviet and also chief of the
party organization in Moscow to clear this most important of the
Tammany Halls of Trotskyists : his Moscow machine became the strong-
est in the Soviet Union. He built the Moscow subway, no mean feat.
And it was he who was charged by Stalin with enforcing the grain
collections in the tragic autumn of 1932 ; he took city workers and Red

540 INSIDE EUROPE

Army men out into the fields, seized every pood of wheat the govern-
ment could claim.

Kaganovitch is black-haired, black-mustached, tall and powerful in
physique, somewhat melodramatic in facial features. He is probably the
best orator in the Soviet Union, and he inherits something of Trotsky’s
magnetism. He is the only member of the Politburo the reports of
whose speeches are punctuated with the remarks ‘"Laughter,” or “Loud
Laughter.” He has, indeed, a considerable gift for pungent comedy.
His speech to the last party congress was devoted largely to an attack on
faulty management, bureaucracy, inefficiency. He mentioned that the
People’s Commissariat of Agriculture had twenty-nine boards and two
hundred and two sectors. (A voice: “Oh Oh!”) Kaganovitch went on:
“That’s nothing. Each sector manages the whole of the U.S.S.R.”
(Laughter.)

He made great play by describing two officials in a rope factory, one
named Neoslabny (the word in Russian means “indefatigable”), the
other Prelestnikov (“charming”). “One was in charge of the knot-tying
department, the other of the knot-untying department. As one tied
knots, the other untied them (laughter). . . .” And he mentioned a
government department known as the Sector for the Supervision of
Fulfillment of Decisions, which took five months to perform a job it
should have done in five days. The initials of this department form
the Russian equivalent of the word S.L.E.E.P. Kaganovitch mentioned
this, and brought the house down.

“The plan for the Red Dawn Knitted Goods Mills,” said Kagano-
vitch, “was examined in five different commissariats and boards, and
also in forty-six sectors. The mills received nineteen different sets of
instructions, every one of which contradicted all the others. The plans
were altered over and over again. The result was that the factory worked
without any plan. The plan for 1933 was finally endorsed on January
4, 1934. The plan for 1933 was only one year and four days late.”
(Laughter.)

He is merciless in flaying inefficiency. On one occasion he caustically
described an order for “haberdashery” which included dog-collars — and
enough dog-collars “to clothe all the dogs in the region in collars from
head to foot” — ^and a shipment of tons of lamp burners without lamp
glasses, lamp glasses without lamp burners,

Kaganovitch ; “And so the red tape is spun out.”

Stalin (interrupting) : “And then the document is put in the files.”

MEN AROUND STALIN 541

The details of Kaganovitch’s life are interesting in that they so typi-
cally represent the careers of many younger communists. He was born
in the Ukraine in i893j 3 -nd had only two years of elementary school,
then went to work for a living, first as an ordinary factory laborer,
then as an apprentice saddler. He entered the party m 1911, and fought
through the civil wars. He held party posts in Samara, Nizhni-Novgorod,
and Turkestan, and in 1922 attracted Stalin’s attention, to become chief
of the party organization in the Ukraine. Stalin brought him to Moscow
in 1928.

When he became commissar for ways of communication (the official
name of the railways job) he had to give up his presidency of the
Moscow Soviet. But he has plenty of other positions. He is a member
of the Politburo of the party, of the organization bureau, and of the
Central Committee. He is on the presidium of the Central Executive
Committee of the U.S.S.R. and of the R.S.F.S.R. And he is an execu-
tive of the Red Trade Unions, and of STO, the Council for Labor and
Defense. Lately he has been put in charge of heavy industry.

His sister is — or was — ^an intimate of Stalin’s, not an unimportant
point.

Boss of the Red Army

Kdeminti Efremovich Voroshilov, the chief military man of the Soviet
Union, is minister of war. He was born of a workman’s family, like
Kaganovitch, and he went to work in a mine at the age of six. He never
went to school. Bom in 1881, he joined the party as early as 1903,
and thus ranks among the veterans. As a boy he was arrested for re-
fusing to take off his hat to a tsarist officer. Then began his career as
an active revolutionary; in the revolution of 1905 he was chairman
of the soviet of workers’ deputies in Lugansk.

He lived, like Stalin, half underground till 1917. Then he organized
the first Red detachments in the civil wars in the Ukraine. He became
commander first of the fifth Ukrainian Army, then of the tenth, and in
1919 was appointed leader of cavalry for the whole Soviet Union. In
1924-25 he was commander of the Moscow military district. He was
on Stalin’s side, not Trotsky’s, and when the war commissarship became
vacant, Stalin saw that Voroshilov got it. His country house is in the
neighborhood of Stalin’s, and the two are very close friends.

Voroshilov is the most popular leader in the Soviet Union. He is not
ambitious, not a politician, and his personality is pleasing. He is blond,

542

INSIDE EUROPE

short in the waist, and looks almost like a cherub. He is not an intriguer,
not a wire-puller ; neither a fanatic nor an arid intellectual, he is easily
the most personable of the commissars.

When Trotsky, mounted in the Red Square, reviewed troops, the
crowd cried, “What a manj” When Voroshilov does it, they cry, “What
a horse!’’ So the joke goes. But in fact Voroshilov is very popular in
the army. He is not a very strict disciplinarian, but his men respect
him because he allows no cliques or favoritism; he is the guardian of
fair play. Also, he is a crack shot, and his sharpshooters like to think
that their chief is as good as they are.

He is too easy-going to be very quick-witted. At the last party con-
gress he rambled on, speaking of difficulties in transport. “Which diffi-
culties are greater,” he asked, “the subjective or the objective? Un-
doubtedly the subjective ones are greater. In what do they consist? In
disorganization and in the absence of elementary discipline. I don’t
know if I am revealing secrets. . . (Laughter and applause.)

Quick as a bee, Kaganovitch, on the platform, caught this indiscre-
tion. He interrupted : “Even if you did reveal something, we would not
have the right to forbid revelations at the party congress. . .

Voroshilov may be slow in speech, but he has all the jargon pat. He
calls the kulaks working at forced labor the “army of heroic-canal
diggers.”

His main difficulty as the man responsible for the defense of the
Soviet Union is transport. Thus it is a good thing that he works on
terms of the greatest cordiality with Kaganovitch, though they ipight
easily be rivals. Backwardness in transportation is one of the reasons
for the abnormal size of the Soviet army, which is by far the largest
in the world. It is really two armies, one in the east, one in the west.
Both are necessary, because in the event of war the immense distances
in Russia and Siberia, plus inefficiency and inadequacy of the rail-
way system, would make the transfer of even one division from front
to front a long, laborious process.

The Red Army is an unknown quantity. It is strong in numbers and
in mechanical equipment ; as to its stamina and morale, no one knows.
The great purge in 1937 killed off, it is believed, at least fifty per cent
of its higher officers. The rank and file were by and large untouched.
Even so, the shock of the purges to discipline and ideals must have
been severe.

MEN AROUND STALIN

543

The Other Incomparable Max

'When Litvinov comes here, Roosevelt must stand firm on one point. We cannot
recognize Soviet Russia until it acknowledges and repudiates its debts in the good,
sound, capitalist way”

(Howard Brubaker — ^before American recognition of the U.S.S.R.)

This unpluckable burr in the flesh of Western Europe, this man who
had the temerity to go to a disarmament conference and really suggest
disarmament, became such a stable citizen in the past few years — so
portly, well-groomed, so worldly-wise and diplomatically substantial —
that one was apt to forget his origins and early years. Maxim Maxim-
ovitch Litvinov has not always been Maxim Maximovitch Litvinov.
At one time or other he owned the following noms de rivolution —
Papasha; Felike; David Mordecai Finkelstein; Litvinov Harrison;
Luvinye; M. G. Harrison; Gustav Graf. And his real name is Moysheev
Vallakh.

Litvinov, foreign minister for years until 1939, was born in 1876 in
Bialystok, then in Russia, part of Poland thereafter, and now Russia
again. He came of a bourgeois Jewish family and received a regular
high-school education. He was drafted into the tsarist army — ^a little-
known fact — ^and served five years as a common soldier. His army ex-
perience turned him into a revolutionary, and in 1901 he was arrested
and sentenced to exile in Siberia. As slippery physically then as he
was diplomatically later, he escaped while en route to prison and fled
to Switzerland. He met Lenin, and in 1903 joined the party.

For a considerable interval his life was, like that of Stalin, compact
of revolutionary adventure, lucky escapes, long and patient hours of
research and preparation, crime, wile and counterwile, and enough
colorful episode to fill a movie. He returned illegally to Russia and
after the collapse of the 1905 revolution was intrusted with shipping
contraband arms to a secret depot on the island of Nargan, near Tallinn.

The year 1906 he spent more tranquilly editing the legal newspaper
New Life in St. Petersburg. In 1907 adventure called again; he was
the agent sent abroad to market the notes and bonds Stalin had pro-
cured in the bank raid at Tiflis. Litvinov got to Paris with the revolu-
tionary booty, disposed of it, and was promptly arrested by the French
police and expelled from France. He returned to Russia briefly. Then
he went to London and lived in exile, close to Lenin, for almost ten
years.

INSIDE EUROPE

544

His life was brilliantly dual. By day he was a publisher’s clerk, seem-
ingly absorbed in the highly bourgeois routine of reading manuscript,
correcting proof, making out accounts ; by night he was a philosopher,
a revolutionaiy. He earned his living first in the publishing house,
then as a purchasing agent for — of all things — ^a German electrical
and munitions firm, the ^Siemens-Schuckert Company. So came his
bread and butter. The food of his soul pame from Lenin.

Immediately the Bolshevik revolution occurred in 1917 Litvinov was
appointed the plenipotentiary representative of the Soviets in Great
Britain. But in August, 1918, he was arre§ted and imprisoned as hostage
for Bruce Lockhart, the British Agent whom the Bolsheviks had jailed
in Moscow. Lockhart was presently released, and Litvinov returned to
the U.S.S.R., becoming a member of the collegium of the Narko-
mindel (foreign office). He was assistant commissar under Chicherin
till 1930, then commissar.

Litvinov’s years from 1918 to 1939 were packed with incessant travel,
incessant negotiation. The record of his trips and treaties is prodigious.
In 1918 he visited Stockholm, in 1919 Tallinn, in 1920 Copenhagen, in
1921 Tallinn again, arranging post-war settlements. He went to Genoa
and The Hague in 1922, as member of Soviet delegations, and also
made the agreement with the American Relief Commission. In 1925 he
concluded commercial treaties with Germany and Norway; in 1926 he
began his annual explosive visits to the disarmament pourparlers at
Geneva, and provoked the successive amusement, indignation, rage, and
finally respect of the Western powers. He went to Washington in 1933
to negotiate recognition between America and the U.S.S.R. ; and imi934
he saw Soviet Russia into the League of Nations. For five years there-
after, he battled at Geneva for the Russian line.

Litvinov is fat. He speaks English with a heavy accent. His chief
quality is an inveterate stubbornness in argument, which arises from
his unvaryingly consistent point of view, plus an elasticity in negotia-
tion that few statesmen in Europe can equal. More and more, he was
sought on Geneva commissions for all sorts of business, because his
stubborn and wary intelligence^ made him useful in every kind of
tangle.

* Example of his realism : In private conversation during the Locarno crisis in
London, deploring the failure of sanctions against Italy as a deterrent toward Ger-
many, he said : “We thought we were rehearsing for a play, but if there isn’t going
to be a play, why rehearse?"

MEN AROUND STALIN 545

In I 9 I 5 > while he was in exile in London, Litvinov married the cele-
brated Ivy, niece of Sir Sidney Low. She became the first lady of the
Soviets, hostess at the official receptions which Litvinov gave as foreign
minister. It is not an asset to him that his wife is an Englishwoman,
She caused a minor tempest when, some years ago, she wrote for a
Berlin newspaper a feuilleton describing with admiration some of the
pleasant things about Berlin — ^the wide clean streets, bright shop win-
dows, and so forth. The Bolshevik Press in Moscow stormed at
Litvinov for harboring a little bourgeois in the home.

Their family life is happy, if record of the telephone conversation
he had with her from Washington to Moscow is any indication. Let
those who believe that Bolsheviks eat babies for breakfast listen in :

L. Hello.

Ivy. Hello, darling. I can hear you beautifully.

L. Speak slowly, will you?

Ivy. Where are you ?

L. In the White House. . . . President Roosevelt asked me to give
you his regards.

Ivy. Thank you very much, regards to him. . . . Mischa would like
to say a word to you.

L. Mischa is with you ? Hello, Mischa. How are your studies ?

Mischa. Very nice. How are you, Papa?

L. What kind of weather are you having?

Ivy. Beautiful, clear snow. . . . How is everything in the delega-
tion — ^all well?

L. Yes.

Ivy. When shall we see you? , . .

L. Love and kisses. Good-by.

Litvinov, who was considered a kind of technician in foreign policy,
almost an engineer, was never as important within Russia as outside.
In May, 1939 he was suddenly dropped. He had no idea that the ax
was going to fall. But he was so closely identified with the League and
collective security that he lost his usefulness when Stalin determined
to sign up with Germany. Besides, he was a Jew.

Females of the Species

Ivy Litvinov is rather untypical of Soviet women, because she has no
job herself. Stalin's wife worked. So do several other important men's
wives, and many women, quite in their own right, have established suc-
cessful careers. In no country in Europe is it so easy for a woman
of intelligence and character to make good outside the home.

INSIDE EUROPE

546

The wives of Rosengoltz (former head of the foreign trade com-
missariat), Bubnov (former minister of education in the R.S.F,S.R.),
and Krylenko (minister of justice) all have — or had — ^jobs. The wife of
Kalinin, president of the U.S.S.R., is manager of a state farm near
Novosibirsk. Molotov’s wife, Pauline Semyonova Zhemchuzhna, was till
recently head of the Soviet trust which manufactures powder, rouge,
lipstick.

Nadiezda Kroupskaya, Lenin's widow, lived and worked in the Krem-
lin until her death in 1938; she was assistant commissar of education in
the R.S.F.S.R. Madame V. N. Yakovleva is minister of finance in the
R,S.F.S.R. — one of the most important jobs in the world to be held
by a woman. Pelegeya Yakovlevna Voronova, a party member since
1917 and a former textile worker, is assistant commissar for light
industry for the U.S.S.R. A veteran Bolshevik, Klavdiya Ivanovna
Nikalaeva, formerly a work-woman in a factory, member of the party
since 1909, is chief of division of propaganda and mass work of the
central committee of the party. Madame Alexandra Kollontay is Soviet
minister to Sweden.

As a rule leading Bolsheviks do not, except among intimates, go
out with their wives; for that matter, they seldom entertain or receive
formal entertainment themselves. Women do not participate in social
activity unless by reason of their own merit of position. No outsider
can recall ever having seen Kaganovitch’s wife, or Voroshilov’s. They
may not even be married. No one pays attention. The matter of mar-
riage is not of sufficient importance to be inserted in the party Who’s
Who.

Kalinin

Michael Ivanovitch Kalinin, born in 1875, in the province of Tver,
son of a peasant, was sent off to work for his living at the age of
sixteen, as a stable boy and second footman on the near-by estate of
a wealthy aristocrat. He migrated to St. Petersburg, and became a fac-
tory workman there. He joined the party in 1898. To-day he is chairman
ot the All-Union Central Executive Committee, and thus ‘‘President
of Russia.” It is Kalinin who, as formal head of the Soviet Union,
receives diplomats when they present themselves at the Kremlin.

His titular importance is greater than his actual power. Yet his influ-
ence, particularly on Stalin personally, is apt to be underestimated;
his opinion carries weight, especially in matters concerning the peasants.

MEN AROUND STALIN

547

Kalinin, a peasant himself, who still wears peasant clothes, is an au-
thority on agrarian life, and the peasants trust him. Kalinin was a
great friend of Lenin’s, and it was he who announced Lenin’s death.
Duranty’s description of his speech and the emotion it evoked should
be imperishable.

Molotov

When I was first in Moscow in 1928, Molotov had recently become
a member of the Politburo, but scarcely anyone knew his name. He
was predominantly a party man, ^'Stalin’s shadow,” and his function in
the Politburo seemed to be to watch party affairs. One by one the
giants of those days, Rykov and Bukharin and Tomsky, were dismissed
and later shot ; and in the twinkling of a shadow, it seemed, the incon-
spicuous Molotov had become chairman of the council of people’s com-
missars, the job he still holds — prime minister.

Rykov, his predecessor as premier, was the single leading Bolshevik
with a university education ; but Molotov never went even to grammar
school. Bukharin was a dazzling theoretician, orator, writer of polem-
ics; but Molotov, as Lenin said, was ‘‘the best filing clerk in the
Soviet Union.” Stalin knew the kind of man he wanted. He was tired
of flamboyant theorists ; he wanted cool administrators. He liked Molotov
for several reasons. For one thing, he had, like Stalin himself, stuck it
out inside Russia during the long underground period, never once
having retreated to easy exile.

“Molotov” is a pseudonym, like Stalin; it means “hammer.” His
real nanje is Vlacheslav V. Skriabin. He was born in 1890 of a worker’s
family, and entered the party in 1906. In February, 1917, he was chair-
man of the Bolshevik faction of the Petrograd soviet. From that time
on he has had the full confidence of Stalin. It is quite likely that he
might take precedence over Kaganovitch or Voroshilov if Stalin died,
and so — ^behind his back — ^people call him “the Czarevitch.”

He has a fine forehead, and looks and acts like a French professor of
medicine — orderly, precise, a bit pedantic. He is a vegetarian and a tee-
totaler. His importance is sometimes not appreciated ; he is by no means
a mere figurehead, but a man of considerable intelligence and influence.
Stalin for a time gave him most of the dirty work to do f for instance
he had the nasty job of admitting how many cattle and hogs were killed

®As Hitler, for instance, made Hess give the first apologia for the events of
June 30.

INSIDE EUROPE

548

by the peasants before the famine. In 1939, as StaKn prepared his neii
orientation in foreign policy, Molotov became foreign mimster.

Pattern for Leadership

Most leaders in the ^Soviet Union are cut to the same pattern. Ex
treme poverty in youth ; self-education and manual labor f revolutionarj
activity from the beginning; punishment before 1917 and success there
after, plus murderously hard work and untiring obsession to the cause
Any of a dozen men deserve detailed mention. But their careers varj
only in minor detail.

Andrey A. Andreyev, one of the most important younger Bolsheviks,
a member of the Supreme Council of the U.S.S.R., and secretary of
the Central Committee of the party, was born in 1896. His father was
a janitor. He had only two years in school. Andrey A. Zhdanov, for
years the party boss in Leningrad, was — ^late in 1939 — closer to Stalin
than any man in Russia. When they appear together at party meetings,
Stalin bends toward him, listening. Like Andreyev, he is a member of
the Supreme Council and a party secretary. He is the son of a school
teacher.

The Gay-Pay-Oo

A vast lot of nonsense has been written about the G.P.U. Of course,
terror played a considerable role in the evolution of the U.S.S.R., and
the Gay-Pay-Oo, the secret police, was the instrument of terror. Stalin
himself has defined its function in no uncertain terms :

'The G.P.U. is the pimitive organ of the Soviet government: it is
more or less similar to the Committee of Public Safety which existed
during the great French revolution. It punishes primarily spies, plotters,
terrorists, bandits, speculators, forgers. It is something in the nature
of a military political tribunal set up for the purpose of protecting the
interests of the revolution from attacks on the part of counter-revolu-
tionary bourgeoisie and their agents.”

{Leninism, I, 419.)

Note well that the G.P.U. has powers, not merely to arrest, but, as
Stalin admits, to punish. It is judge, jury, executioner, all in one. But,
on the other hand, it is not exclusively a political police. One hears
mostly stories of its melodramatic activities. It is much more, however,

* Mikoyan was a mechanic for instance, Postyshev an electrician, Eikhe a ship’s
stoker. Workmen tried to make Russia work.

MEN AROUND STALIN

549

than a force that engages in espionage and shoots suspects and traitors.
The G.P.U. numbers about 200,000 picked men, and is in a sense a su-
perior cadre of the Red Army; it guards frontiers, patrols railways, and
the like. Especially it watches affairs within the party. The law-abiding
citizen who is not a party member has less to fear from it than party
men.

The terror in Russia is an agent of social aims, as the Bolsheviks
put it. Better to kill a few people — even if by chance they are innocent
— ^than risk a counter-revolution in which many thousands may die, and
which might kill the Soviet experiment. There is a big streak of the
Oriental in Russians, with a concomitant Oriental contempt for the value
of individual life. Moreover, one should not forget that the Bolsheviks
drew a terrible lesson from the Paris Commime, when 30,000 com-
munards were executed by the reaction.

The first leader of the G.P.U. was a friend of Lenin's named
Dzherzhinsky, a Pole of enormous ability and fanaticism. He was a
policeman-mystic, one of the most extraordinary characters of modern
times. He died, to be succeeded by a more commonplace man, Menzhin-
sky. When Menzhinsky in turn died, his place was taken by G. G.
Yagoda, a careerist and wire-puller, corrupt and unscrupulous, whom
Stalin got rid of in 1937. His successor, Yezhov, was an outrageous
fanatic, largely responsible for the purges that followed. He gave way
in December, 1938, to a much less violent man, L. P. Beria.

The G.P.U. became a bit of nuisance to the Kremlin during the
Yagoda period. It stupidly arrested foreign engineers, and shocked for-
eign public opinion by wanton slaughter of Russian professors and in-
tellectuals accused of ^'sabotage." It failed to uncloak for many years
the activities of a remarkable spy named Konar, a Polish agent who
succeeded in becoming Soviet Assistant Commissar of Agriculture. Stalin
decided to curtail the powers of the G.P.U. On July 10, 1934, it was
reorganized with considerably restricted authority ; the name G.P.U. dis-
appeared ; it was no longer allowed to impose the death penalty without
trial ; and its title was changed to ^‘Commissariat of Home Affairs.”

Six months later, on December i, 1934, Stalin’s best friend, Sergei
Mironovitch Kirov, member of the Politburo and boss of Leningrad, was
shot and killed by a communist assassin — ^the first assassination or at-
tempted assassination of a Bolshevik notability since Fanny Kaplan’s
shooting of Lenin in 1918. This gave the G.P.U. chance to reassert it-
self — ^with extreme unpleasantness.

INSIDE EUROPE

550

Stalin heard the news and took the first train to Leningrad, Voro-
shilov accompanying him. Panic struck Moscow. The Soviet Union had
a bad attack of nerves. Kirov’s assassin, it was discovered, was not a
'"White,” but a communist himself, a young man named Leonid Niko-
laiev. The heads of the G.P.U. in Leningrad were jailed for negligence.
Nikolaiev was quizzed, tried, and with thirteen alleged accomplices, shot.

The reason for Kirov’s assassination was a confused melange of per-
sonal and political forces. Nikolaiev had been dismissed from the com-
munist party in one of its periodic purges, then, after a brief stay in
the wilderness, reinstated. He was a theorist, a radical, and apparently
he had objected with some heat to the growing development of "socialist
inequality.” Besides, he had personal differences with Kirov, who, it
seemed, was his wife’s lover. He permitted this on the understanding
that Kirov would give him favors, get him a better job. Klirov fell down
on the promise, and Nikolaiev shot him.

Kirov was an extraordinary person. He was an orphan. The legend
is that he was suckled by a sow. He was born in 1886, and brought up
in an asylum; he joined the party in 1904, and after the revolution be-
came one of Stalin’s first henchmen ; he was intrusted with the clean-up
of Zinovievists in Leningrad, as Kaganovitch swept the Trotskyists out
of Moscow. He was harsh, vital, impressive, cunning, uncouth, bold —
a great leader of men; and his death removed a powerful figure from
the party.

The G.P.U. resumed its usual capers after Kirov’s death. It was the
"Commissariat of Home Affairs” in name, but the good old G.P.U. in
spirit still. One hundred and three persons were executed, as well as
the thirteen said to have been Nikolaiev’s accomplices. It was not pre-
tended that the hundred and three had anything whatever to do with
the Kirov case. They were, however, not innocent men and women picked
off the streets, as was alleged. All were in prison at the time Kirov was
shot; all were accused of some crime or other, from conspiracy to as-
sassinate Stalin to espionage on behalf of foreign powers ; all had been
convicted of some offense.

Stalin then dissolved the Society of Old Bolsheviks, an organization
founded by Lenin’s friends in 1922 and including only the party fathers,
those with more than eighteen solid years in the revolutionary move-
ment. These Old Bolsheviks, "radicals,” were a nuisance to Stalin. The
Kirov murder was a perfect pretext for wiping up old scores. Stalin
precisely followed the technique of Hider after June 30 ; he made use

MEN AROUND STALIN

551

o£ an artificial panic in the country to undertake Draconian steps for
which otherwise he had small excuse.

Then came the arrest of the veteran dissident-communists Zinoviev
and Kamenev, charged with complicity in the Kirov plot. After this—
violent crisis all over Russia, as the great treason trials began.

Succession

Kirov was the man being groomed by Stalin as his successor. He is
dead ; and the succession would now seem to be between Kaganovitch,
Voroshilov, and Molotov. Nond is a satisfactory candidate: Kagano-
vitch is a Jew, Voroshilov is too limited in interests, Molotov not big
enough a personality. Another possibility is Zhdanov, who is more and
more talked of — in whispers — ^as the future leader.

If Stalin should die, the party ^ not one man, would of course attempt
to take over. Personal rivalries, like those that followed the death of
Lenin, are perfectly possible, but it is unlikely that they could disrupt
the regime. Discipline is strict, and the party is unanimous within itself
on major issues. There is no obvious candidate for power in Russia,
like Goering in Germany, simply because no man in the U.S.S.R. can
be unduly prominent if he is conspicuously ambitious. The Soviet State
could hardly be more affected by the death of Stalin than it was by the
death of Lenin.

Chapter XXXIX
The Russian Trials

IN AUGUST, 1936, a series of treason trials began in the U.S.S.R.,
■ that perplexed and indeed stupefied the western world. Old Bolsheviks
like Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried and shot ; so were important vice-
commissars like Pyatakov and generals like Tukhachevsky, who was con-
sidered the No, 2 military man in the Soviet Union. Incredibly sensa-
tional details were alleged: that Trotsky was negotiating with Hitler,
that such well-known leaders as Radek and Sokolmkov plotted the over-
throw of the Stalinist government, that generals who had devoted their
lives to the Red Army sold out to Germany and Japan. Those found
guilty were given short shrift. It seemed that friends of the Soviet Union
were confronted with two alternatives equally unpleasant, that (a) the
opposition to Stalin was much more serious than anyone had believed,
reaching in fact the very heart of the army and the state, or (b) Stalin
was a ruthless murderer getting rid of Trotskyist or other opponents and
indeed anyone he didn’t happen to like, by means of the most monstrous
frame-up of modern times.

Let us dismiss at outset some of the fairy tales. Stalin, some whis-
perers had it, was mortally ill, and was extirpating the last remnants of
opposition while he was still alive ; according to other '"reports” he had
suddenly gone "insane.” It was said that the prisoners were tortured,
hypnotized, drugged (in order to make them give false confessions) and
—a choice detail— impersonated by actors of the Moscow Art theater!
But the trials occurred soon after the preliminary investigations were
concluded, and they took place before hundreds of witnesses, many of
them experienced correspondents, in open court. The prisoners testified
that they were well-treated during the investigation. Radek, indeed, says
that it was he who tortured the prosecutor, by refusing to confess month
after month. Pressure there certainly was, in the manner of police in-
vestigation all over the world, but no evidence of torture.

The trials, the Trotskyists assert, were a colossal frame-up. The pris-
oners were induced to confess, they say, on a promise of immunity and
a pardon after the trial— if they talked freely— and then double-crossed
and shot. This is hardly conceivable from a close reading of the testi-

55 «

THE RUSSIAN TRIALS

mony. It could not easily have occurred in the second trial, when the
defendants must have known that the first batch, despite their confes-
sions, were sentenced to death and duly executed. On the other hand,
the defendants probably hoped that whoever behaved best might get off
with a light sentence.

An important point to keep in mind is the peculiarity of Russian legal
procedure. It differs drastically froni ours, and resembles to some extent
the French system, where the real '^trial” is the preliminary investiga^
tion ; the final court session does not so much determine guilt as decide
what penalty shall be attached to the guilty. In Russia, a prisoner is not
brought to what we call a ‘‘trial” until he has confessed. Within the cir-
cumscriptions of Russian procedure the trials were fair enough. The
defendants had the right of legal defense ; they had the privilege of cross-
examining witnesses; they talked with the greatest vivacity and free-
dom. The attitude of the court was severe but not coercive. The closing
speeches of the prosecutor, A. Y. Vyshinsky, were violent, but during
the testimony he treated the defendants with reasonable consideration.
For instance :

Vyshinsky : Accused Pyatakov, perhaps you are tired.

Pyatakov : No, I can go on.

The President: I propose to adjourn at 3 o'clock.

Vyshinsky : I do not object, but perhaps it is tiring for the accused?
Pyatakov: How much longer?

The President : Fifty minutes.

Vyshinsky then resumes the questioning.

The confessions, in both the first and second trials, bewildered ob-
servers because it seemed literally inconceivable (a) that men like
Sokolnikov, Smirnov, Radek, Serebryakov, and so on could possibly be
traitors, and (b) that they should have so meekly gone to conviction
without a struggle. Point (a) we shall come to later on. As to point (b),
the defendants did struggle. It lasted during all the preliminary examina-
tion which was prolonged. Radek held out two and a half months. Mura-
lov, an old Trotskyist, held out eight months. Radek says of him, "I
was convinced he would rather perish in prison than say a single word.”

The first trial, with the old Bolsheviks Zinoviev, Kamenev, and
Smirnov as the chief defendants, opened on August 19, 1936. It was
heard by the military collegium of the supreme court, with V. V. Ulrich
as the presiding judge and Vyshinsky as prosecutor. The defendants
were accused of forming a terrorist “center” in Leningrad, instigated

554

INSIDE EUROPE

by Trotsky and devoted to counter-revolution and conspiracy against
the U.S.S.R., of planning the assassination of Stalm and other leaders,
and actively conniving the murder of ICirov. All sixteen defendants were
found guilty and executed.

The highpoint of this trial was the examination of Zinoviev :

Vyshinsky : When was the united center organized ?

Zinoviev: In the summer of 1932. ^

Vyshinsky ; What were its activities ?

Zinoviev ; Its mam activities consisted of making preparations for terror-
ist acts.

Vyshinsky: Against whom?

Zinoviev ; Against the leaders.

Vyshinsky: That is, against Comrades Stalin, Voroshilov, and Kagano-
vitch? Was it your center that organized the assassination of Comrade
Kirov? Was the assassination of Sergei Mironovitch Kirov organized
by your center, or by some other organization ?

Zinoviev: Yes, by our center.

Vyshinsky : In that center there were you, Kamenev, Smirnov, Mrach-
kovsky and Ter-Vaganyan?

Zinoviev : Yes.

Vyshinsky: So you all organized the assassination of Kirov?

Zinoviev ; Yes.

Vyshinsky: So you all assassinated Comrade Kirov?

Zinoviev : Yes.

Vyshinsky : Sit down.

This trial, not the second one, provoked the most natural of the
Trotskyist "'frame-up” charges. It seemed odd, for one thing, that the
""center” was organized in 1932, whereas Kirov was murdered in De-
cember, 1934, and the trial took place only in 1936. Zinovfev and
Kamenev were arrested after the murder and sentenced to exile, then
brought back, arrested again, and tried again. And the testimony — of
which no verbatim record exists in English — ^indicated some remarkable
contradictions. For instance Smirnov was apparently in jail in 1933,
during which time he was supposed to have been plotting with the "‘cen-
ter”; there seems to be considerable confusion about the false Hon-
duras passport of another defendant; another, Holtzman, testified that
he met Sedov, Trotsky's son, in the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in
1932, when in fact no hotel by this name existed in Copenhagen. Sedov
asserts that he was never in Copenhagen in his life.

The second trial, somewhat more convincing, and of which a full rec-
ord exists in various languages, occurred January 23-30, 1937, before

THE RUSSIAN TRIALS

55S

the same court and the same prosecutor. The defendants, seventeen in
all, included Y. L. Pyatakov, the assistant commissar of heavy industry,
Gregory Sokolnikov, the assistant commissar of foreign affairs, Y. A.
Livshitz, the assistant commissar of railways, such well-known old-line
Bolshevists as Muralov and Serebryakov, and of course Radek. Thir-
teen of the seventeen were sentenced to death and shot ; Sokolnikov and
Radek got ten years — ^Radek literally talked himself out of the death
penalty in an inordinately fascinating last plea; two dupes, Arnold (a
sort of cross between the four Marx brothers and the characters in
Gorki’s “Lower Depths”) and Stroilov, got lesser sentences.

The indictment was a good deal broader than that of the first trial.
The defendants were accused of sabotage and wrecking, of selling infor-
mation of military importance to Japan and Germany, of plots to murder
Molotov and other members of the government, and of conspiracy with
Germany and Japan whereby, if the plotters usurped power in the
Soviet Union, the Ukraine was to be surrendered to Germany and the
Maritime Province to Japan, presumably as a price for non-interference
while Stalin was being overthrown. Nothing more sensational or — ^at
first sight — ^incredible could be imagined.

As unfolded inexorably in the testimony, the story begins when
Pyatakov, a well-known Trotskyist who had spent long periods in oppo-
sition and exile, secretly saw Sedov, Trotsky’s son, in Berlin in 1931.
Sedov sounded Pyatakov out; Pyatakov returned to Russia, and cau-
tiously, with infinite slowness and secrecy, communicated with Radek,
Sokolnikov, and the others. Gradually a “parallel” or “reserve” center —
first of *conspiracy, then of terrorism — ^was formed, to back up the
Zinoviev group and carry on if the Zinovievites were exposed and
crushed.

Vyshinsky tried hard to find out how the alleged conspirators disclosed
themselves to one another:

Vyshinsky: What gave Rataichak reasons for disclosing himself to you?
Pyatakov : Two persons had spoken to me . . .

Vyshinsky : Did he disclose himself to you, or did you disclose yourself
to him?

Pyatakov : Disclosure may be mutual.

Vyshinsky: Did you disclose yourself first?

Pyatakov : Who first, he or I— the hen or the egg— I don’t know.

He tried hard to pin Radek down, to make Radek, too, disclose more
fully the interrelations of the group.

INSIDE EUROPE

SS6

Vyshinsky: These actions of yours were deliberate?

Radek: Apart from sleeping, I have never in my life committed any

undeliberate actions.

Vyshinsky : And this, unfortunately, was not a dream ?

Radek : Unfortunately it was not a dream.

Some of the conspifators seemed desperately unhappy at their own
role in the plot, as it tightened and developed. For instance Sokolnikov:

" 7 ust imagine. I am conducting official negotiations at the People’s
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. The conversation draws to a close.
The interpreters have left the room. The official representative of a cer-
tain foreign state, Mr. suddenly turned to me and asked: Am I

informed about the proposals Trotsky has made to his government. . . .
How does Trotsky visualize that? How can I, as Assistant People’s
Commissar, conduct such negotiations ? This is an absolutely impossible
situation.”

Trotsky, according to the testimony, was the heart and soul of the
conspiracy. He sent letters to Radek, concealed in books or shoes ; one
of the intermediaries was the journalist Vladimir Romm, formerly
Isvestia correspondent in Washington, who says he met Trotsky in
Paris. Pyatakov, unless he was lying, took a secret airplane trip from
Berlin to Oslo, and there saw Trotsky, in December, 1935. But there
is no record of an airplane having landed at Oslo on the day mentioned,
Trotsky, questioned by the John Dewey commission in Mexico, denied
flatly that he either met Romm or saw Pyatakov. Trotsky was not in
Paris at all when Romm was there, he insists.

Pyatakov revealed — ^according to his testimony — ^how, amo^g other
things, the Trotskyist movement outside Russia was financed. For in-
stance : in his official capacity as assistant commissar of heavy industry,
Pyatakov (incidentally Lenin in his will called Pyatakov one of the ablest
men in Soviet Russia), gave orders for machinery to German firms and
promised to pay more than the normal price ; the difference went to the
Trotskyists, through Sedov and other agents. But Pyatakov says the
plot was not engineered “purely for the sake of Trotsky’s beautiful eyes.”

Trotsky’s close connection with German Fascists was constantly al-
leged, which seems simply monstrous. Half a dozen times in the testi-
mony Hitler’s first aid, Rudolf Hess, was named as the German negoti-
ator. The court was extremely careful to keep mention of compromising
diplomatic details from the public sessions. Time and again the defend-
ants were rebuked for mentioning foreigners’ names.

THE RUSSIAN TRIALS

557

Radek: I informed him (Sokolnikov) of the directives and asked about

the specific fact regarding , (Name cut from the record.)

The President: Accused Radek, are you trying to provoke us?

Radek : I am not trying to provoke you ; this will not occur again.
Vyshinsky: Such behavior on the part of the accused Radek places me
in a very difficult position during the course of the investigation.

The President: Quite so.

Vyshinsky : You are a man sufficiently well versed in politics to under-
stand that it is forbidden to speak about certain things in Court; this
must be accepted as a demand of the law.

Radek : I deeply apologize ; this ’syill not occur again.

The President : I consider that if Radek repeats anything of this kind,
this question will have to be dealt with in camera,

Radek : I repeat that this will not occur again.

The plot developed although inefficiently. Sabotage did occur. Trains
were wrecked, soldiers killed. Details came out in testimony that make
the flesh creep; officials of the railroads deliberately slowing up car
loadings, disrupting freight schedules, stalling trains (the chief train-
wrecker, Knyazev, confessed to getting 15,000 rubles from a Japanese
agent) ; engineers ruining chemical factories by burning out their fur-
naces and sabotaging work in the mines; one defendant, Shestov, de-
scribed how he ordered the murder of an honest official who suspected
sabotage in the coal industry.

But by the middle of 1935 the conspirators began to lose their en-
thusiasm. Trotsky himself, according to Radek, saw that they could not
bring Stalin down by these means. In the most emotional and moving
passages in the trial Radek describes his gradual awareness that he and
his colleagues have made a terrible mistake. He debates what to do. It
is very difficult for the conspirators to meet ; in the whole course of the
affair Radek, Pyatakov, and Sokolnikov actually see one another and
confer only two or three times. Radek comes finally to a conclusion :

Vyshinsky: What did you decide?

Radek : The first step to take would be to go to the Central Committee
of the Party, to make a statement, to name all the persons. This I did
not do. It was not I that went to the G.P.U., but the G.P.U. that came
for me.

Vyshinsky: An eloquent reply.

Radek : A sad reply.

It would be obtuse to deny or gloss over some extreme weaknesses
in the testimony. For instance the prosecutor went back to Kirov over
and over again, but he could never make Radek or Sokolnikov at least

INSIDE EUROPE

558

admit they had any connection with the assassination or knowledge of
it. Again, it may well be asked why the conspirators, with years to work
in, were so inadequate and bungling; aside from sabotage which was
after all minor, they accomplished little. The one attempted assassination,
that of Molotov, with which they were charged, sounds '‘fishy” in the
extreme. But the man 'in charge of it was Arnold, an exceedingly fishy
character.

Again, there was very little actual evidence. Prime evidence would
have been the letters Trotsky sent to Radek. But Radek says he burned
them (as he might prudently have done).

Reasonably neutral observers construct a "theory” about the trials
more or less as follows :

1. Every important defendant in the first and second trials was a
Zinovievite or a Trotskyist. Radek, Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, Serebryakov,
had been Trotskyists for years. Radek joined the Trotsky faction in
1923, went into exile, and only recanted in 1929; he was readmitted to
grace in 1930. Their opposition to Stalin was ingrained and inexpunge-
able; they were Trotskyists to the bone; when they saw things going
badly according to their lights, it was perfectly reasonable for them to
mrn back to their old leader.

2. Moreover, these old revolutionaries, quite apart from the fact that
they were Trotskyists and therefore dissidents, were conspirators by
nature, conspirators born and bred. From their very earliest days they
had breathed the air of plot and counterplot. The day of their eminence
passed ; Stalin wanted engineers and administrators ; they were naturally
disgruntled. In a police-run state like Russia, one should remember, dis-
content can be expressed only by conspiracy. And Radek and company
were congenitally incapable of giving conspiracy up.

3. The Trotskyists — outside Russia at least — ^made no effort to con-
ceal their violent hatred of the Stalinist regime. They were far beyond
such "bourgeois” considerations as orthodox patriotism. They were world
revolutionaries, and they no longer regarded the U.S.S.R. as a revolu-
tionary or communist state. They had the same aim as pre-1939 Ger-
many and Japan, to overthrow the Stalinist regime. Stalin was as much
an enemy to them as Hitler. And they were willing to cooperate even
with Hitler, at that time an obvious ally, for their supreme goal — Stalin's
destruction.

4. Radek and the others testified over and over again — the central
issue of the trial— that they felt war to be inevitable in 1933 or 1934 and

559

THE RUSSIAN TRIALS

that the Russians would be defeated. They thought that things were
going very badly, and that when the crash came the Soviet Union would
not survive it. Therefore, as good world revolutionaries, they deemed it
their duty to get to work and perfect an underground organization that
would survive the war, so that revolutionary communism would not al-
together perish. Also, if war came, they might’ themselves have had a
chance at getting power in Russia, ,and therefore an attempt to buy the
Germans off, buy the Japanese off, was natural.

5. So much for Radek and his friends inside. As regards Trotsky
outside, an anti-Trotskyist could 'probably add two more considerations:
(a) Trotsky was actively eager for a German war against the U.S.S.R.,
and he hoped that the U.S.S.R. would lose — ^therefore he sought to
weaken it by sabotage ; (b) his ambition and his lust for ofKce were such
that he was quite willing to give up the Ukraine and the Maritime Prov-
inces as a price for power. One should not forget that Trotsky fought
the Tsar during the Great War much as he fights Stalin now, that Lenin
crossed Germany with German aid in a German sealed train, and that
Trotsky signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk giving an immense amount
of Russian territory to Germany.

Finally— and very importantly— it is quite possible that the tnals were
exploited inside Russia to impress the Russian masses. The government
exaggerated the crimes of the victims in order to simplify the issue. The
overthrow of capitalism in the U.S.S.R., the partition of the country,
were added to the indictment to give the crimes of the conspirators a
final and overwhelming smear of black. Stalin was eager to clean out
the Trotskyists once for all, they were conveniently in his hands, and
he neglected no factor to make the job as thorough and complete as
possible.

The third trial, that of the generals, was of a different category; pro-
ceedings were secret and the testimony has not been published. An-
nouncement simply came on June ii, 1937, that eight high officers of
the Red Army, including Marshal Tukhachevsky, had been arrested,
tried for traitorous behavior, and promptly shot. Among the eight were
General Putna, formerly the Russian military attache in Berlin and
London (he was named as a conspirator in the second trial). General
Yakir, the commander of the Leningrad military district. General Uboro-
vitch, former commander in White Russia, General Eidemann, the head
of Osoaviakhim, and General Feldman, the chief of the personnel di-
vision of the general staflf. The generals were accused of treasonable

INSIDE EUROPE

560

relations with Germany and Japan, and the betrayal of the Red Army
in the event of war.

This shocked world opinion warmly. It seemed incredible that men
like Tukhachevsky, who had devoted the totality of their lives to the
defense of the Soviet Union, could be guilty of wantonly planning its
defeat. Tukhachevsky,'' only 44, had a brilliant revolutionary and mili-
tary career ; he was one of the great heroes of the Soviet Union. Dissi-
dent careerists like Zinoviev and Kamenev, no longer prominent, were
one thing; eight generals in the prime of their powers including Tuk-
hachevsky and Yakir were quite another. Many friends of Russia, even
if unwillingly, accepted the first two trials; they found it extremely
difficult to accept the third.

But investigation, so far as investigation was possible, began to dis-
close a number of enlightening details. Tukhachevsky, brilliant and am-
bitious, wanted power for himself ; he and Voroshilov were on bad terms,
it was said ; a general impression in military circles is that Tukhachevsky
planned a “palace” coup d'etat to get rid of Stalin and set up a dictator-
ship himself. Stalin got him first.

All eight of the generals had close relations at one time with the Ger-
man Reichswehr. The Red Army and the German army worked inti-
mately together before 1932, it should be remembered ; every year Rus-
sian officers went to Germany for training and study ; even after Hitler,
the two general staffs had a cordial respect for each other. Generals
Kork and Feldman, with obviously German names, were Baltic Ger-
mans; General Uborovitch attended the German maneuvers after the
Nazi party congress last year; both Kork and Putna had been^-military
attaches in Berlin,

Few people think that Tukhachevsky could have sold out to Ger-
many, or promised the defeat of his own army in the event of war ; but it
is quite possible that he envisaged some arrangement with the Reichs-
wehr independently of Stalin. He wanted the Red Army and the German
army to work together; politics prevented this. He was known to be
an opponent of the Franco-Soviet pact, and the French distrusted him.
One suggestion is that the Reichswehr planned to overthrow Hitler just
as Tukhachevsky wanted to overthrow Stalin, the two armies to refrain
from interference with each other.

Then came the fourth great trial, again a public trial promoted almost
like a festival, in March, 1938, with Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and
Rakovsky as chief defendants. Thus, having eliminated all possible “left”

THE RUSSIAN TRIALS

561

opposition, Stalin now turned to eliminate the last survivors of the
‘‘right” — Bukharin and Rykov. Yagoda, a policeman in the dock, was
a picturesque phenomenon as he sat in court — ^it was he who had pro-
cured the evidence against victims in the previous trials ! Rakovsky was
an old-line Trotskyist who had had a distinguished career as an am-
bassador abroad. Bukharin, Rykov, and Yagoda were condemned to
death and — ^presumably — shot; Rakovsky got off with ten years.

During most of 1938 the purge went drearily on, having repercus-
sions almost everywhere in the Soviet Union. The great bulk of Russian
citizens were not deeply impressed by the public trials, with which they
had only a spectator’s contact; but the purges, striking unpredictably
in every direction, put terror into every heart. Seven presidents of vari-
ous Soviet republics were removed, six prime ministers, thirty-one com-
missars and vice commissars, innumerable army and naval officers, trade
union leaders, and party chieftains, down to the smallest local officials.
Of the 71 members of the Central Committee of the party, its highest
organ, appointed as recently as 1934, only 16 survived in 1939. Some
of the best men in Russia, like Mezhlauk, the creator of the Five Year
plan, and Marshal Bluecher, the commanding officer in the Far East,
disappeared.

Yet Stalin and the regime — ^shaken as they undoubtedly were — ^ap-
peared to have withstood the shock.

Chapter XL

^^Duranty^s Inferno^^

Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I
have sown will never he uprooted,

— ^Lenin

T he things that one most objects to in the Soviet Union are, as a
rule, Russian and not necessarily communist characteristics — cruelty,
slovenliness, crudity in mechanical technique, espionage, red-tape, dirt,
backwardness, administrative inefficiency. It is interesting to read Baede-
ker’s “Russia,” the 1914 edition. You will find that you had to leave
your passport with the police in those days, too, and that to depart
the country you had to have an exit visa. The communists have done
their best to eliminate some of the tedious and cumbersome nuisances
that have always disfigured some aspects of Russian life. But even the
whole weight of the Kremlin cannot, apparently, make the porter of
the Hotel Metropole efficient — or his telephone. The late Frank Wise,
M.P., brought back a pleasant story from one of his Russian trips ; he
visited the central headquarters of the supreme electricity board of the
U.S.S.R. and found the electric bell outside the offices marked “Not
Working.” It is the despair of many communists that Karl Marx- had
his first try-out in, of all countries, Russia; that Das Kapital had to
undergo its first concrete translation into a language as formidably
difficult as Russian.

One point to make regarding the Soviet Union is its colossal and typi-
cally Russian vitality. Perhaps the most important single thing about
the U.S.S.R. to-day is that it is the only modern dictatorship which
has survived a series of tremendous internal crises. Neither Mussolini
nor Hitler has suffered such crises yet. And the chief Soviet crisis —
the resistance of the peasants to industrialization — ^was none the less
severe in that it was self-inflicted. The Soviets have survived twenty-
two terrible years. Despite dvil wars, despite two major famines, the
population has increased by 23,000,000 people since 1918, and is in-
creasing now at the rate of almost 3,000,000 per year. In a generation,

562

“DURANTY’S INFERNO” 563

in other words, the Soviet Union, in its present borders, will contain
200,000,000 people.

Another point to be noted is the emphatic emergence of Russia, in
the view of Russians, as a national state. Be it remembered that the
official name of the country, adopted after the revolution, was U.S.S.R,
— ^Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — 2, name with a profoundly
centrifugal connotation, a label, indicating the permanent possibility
of expansion, of merger with other states. This expansion, indeed,
began in 1939 with the acquisition of White Russia and part of the
Ukraine from Poland. Even' so, the predominant forces in Russia
became centripetal during the 30’s. Russia was taught that it was not
merely a nucleus of communist states, but a Russian national state
as well. The Red Army may fight — eventually — even beyond Finland,
but at the same time it is the Soviet State, the Russian Fatherland,
which it must continue to defend. In February, 1939, Red army soldiers
were given a new oath, not to the "workers of the world” but to the
Soviet government. "Patriotism” in our sense of the term hardly existed
in the U.S S.R. ten years ago. Now even the Pravda runs editorials on
"Mother Russia.”

A third preliminary point to make is that the revolutionary phase
of Soviet policy has distinctly slowed down. In fact anti-Stalinists
would say that the revolution has ceased to exist, and that socialism
in Russia — ^if it ever did exist — ^is now extinct.

Piatiletka

The Five-Year Plan was not a Five-Year Plan at all. This is the
simple gist of it. I have alluded to the Plan several times in these chap-
ters; let us spare a paragraph or two in brief description of the way
it worked and what it means. The fact is that all economy in Russia is
regulated by planning, to infinity and beyond ; successive plans, spaced
into five-year periods for convenience, are, as Duranty says, parts of a
single program, which is continuous.

The Plan was the invention of no single man, though Stalin is fond
of pointing out that he suggested an electrification program to Lenin
as far back as 1921 ; it grew naturally and inevitably out of the nature
of the Soviet system ; and it was put into effect so gradually that even
well-informed correspondents in Russia did not know that the first Plan
had begun until it was under way. The theoretician most largely re-
sponsible for its origin, as far as any one person can take the credit

INSIDE EUROPE

564

was probably Osinski ; the practical man of affairs who most decisively
executed its workings was Mezhlauk, once called the ‘‘ablest man in the
Soviet Union.”

Stalin announced that the first Plan was 93.7 per cent successful. He
was referring to industrial results, and probably he exaggerated. Even
so, it was a tremendous, unprecedented effort ; the only thing in the
world quite to be compared to it was the expansion of the United States
in the frontier period. Industrial output quadrupled in four years, an
“outstanding and unsurpassed achievement.” The production of steel
increased forty per cent in four years, of ^pig iron eighty-four per cent.
Tractor, automobile, engineering, aviation industries were created out
of nothing. Entire new cities were built on the Siberian steppes, or in
the Urals, like Magnitogorsk, an industrial colossus that will probably
become the largest steel plant in Europe. Enough machinery was im-
ported to enable the U.S.S.R. to maintain succeeding five-year plans
with diminishing amounts of foreign aid. Mines were developed — ^with
the not unimportant result that the U.S.S.R. now possesses the third
largest gold reserve in the world. Unemployment ceased. All this, too,
at a time when the capitalist powers were ravaged by an economic crisis
of unprecedented severity and scope.

The Plan had important political results, because it helped to make
Russia a strong national state, and as Chamberlin points out, it thrust
the Soviet center of gravity eastward. The object of the Plan was to
industrialize a largely agrarian country. Nicely, the greatest mineral
deposits were found in regions hitherto almost inaccessible, tucked away
in remote parts of Siberia. Here the heart of new Russia throbs-«^geo-
graphically impregnable. This is important from a military point of
view.

The costs of the Plan were of course enormous. Tens of millions of
people did not have enough to eat; the cruel hungry bottom of subsist-
ence was reached. Human values were utterly replaced by industrial
values ; when human beings resisted, they were ruthlessly destroyed, as
we have seen. In communist jargon, the first Five-Year Plan was a
period of “postponed consumption.” Sacrifice, in other words, had to
precede sufficiency. Also, great as was the success of the Plan, it by no
means produced enough material to satisfy the people. Domestic produc-
tion was intensified, but Russia still remains the largest market in the
world. The standard of living may have improved slightly, but it is
still unbelievably low.

^‘DURANTY’S INFERNO” 565

In the second plan, the tempo of activity was a good deal relaxed. The
second plan was not so much publicized as the first. It aimed to com-
plete the collectivization of agriculture by 1937, and to stress the
production of consumers' goods, rather than heavy industrial products,
in order to lessen the terrible need in Russia for such items as— to
choose at random — snails, decent paper, rop^, kitchen ware, plumbing
utensils, scientific and medical supplies, boots, metal ware. It hoped to
double the food supply in the cities and reduce retail prices something
like thirty-five per cent. And it sought to contain provision for housing,
because the appalling condition of housing in Moscow and the bigger
cities is a disgrace to the Soviet Union — ^and honest sovietites admit it.

^7 Contradict Myself f Very Well, I Conffodidf Myself!’*

The basis of Soviet economy is production for use, not profit. “Each
man shall work according to his abilities, and receive according to his
needs." The communist party considers itself a sort of central organ-
ization with authority over the whole nation to distribute both activity
and rewards according to this formula. It mercilessly extracts profits
from laborers and peasants — for instance H. R. Knickerbocker has
calculated that the profit of the government on grain is one thousand
per cent — but these profits are all plowed back into the business. There
are no private gains. The interests of the country as a whole, as de-
termined by the communist party, are the only criterion. The com-
munists accept nominal managerial salaries for their labor. These
salaries are minuscule. Communists, as a rule, get much less than non-
communist technicians whom they hire. The theory is that all fruits
of production are pooled for redistribution to the common good.
Political democracy is extinct. But economic democracy — ^theoretically —
is complete.

Naturally the operation of this process and modifications to it made
necessary by temporary contingencies have produced a considerable
number of paradoxes, of contradictions. Ferreting them out is a favorite
Moscow sport.

For instance, Soviet citizens may inherit private property — ^although
Soviet law^ limits the heirs-presumptive to direct descendants of the
deceased, or persons in direct connection by marriage or adoption. Dis-
inheritance of minors under eighteen is not allowed. The testator may,

^ For the background of this section i am Indebted to Mr. Ralph Barnes.

566 INSIDE EUROPE

if he wishes (it doesn’t happen very often), leave his property to the
state.

Soviet citizens may, another point not generally known, own property
in the form of houses — though under severe restrictions. Small houses
in towns and also datchas in the country, may be bought (if there are
any buyers) and are absolute individual property of the purchaser, but
one person may not own more than q.ne house and one datcha. Land
may not be owned. The land of the U.S.S.R. is nationalized, the prop-
erty of the state.

A Soviet citizen may buy the ownership to an apartment in a co-
operative house, but he is subject to eviction if — I quote Barnes — ^he
'‘commits a crime, indulges in illicit private trade, or becomes a priest
or counter-revolutionary.” He may, in certain rare cases, lease land
from municipal authorities if he uses it for building purposes.

A Soviet citizen may own a library or art collection, if he registers it
with the authorities. He may buy an automobile — ^if he can afford it.
He may own a sailboat, yacht, or launch. Theoretically, he may own
an airplane, but in practice it is virtually impossible for a private indi-
vidual to obtain one.

A Soviet citizen may even hire the services of another. Personal
servants — domestics — are allowed. He may, with great risk, go into pri-
vate business and employ labor (for instance a neighborhood cobbler
may have one assistant) but in such cases his business is so heavily
taxed that profits are virtually impossible. A professional man, doctor or
lawyer, may have a private practice provided he is not in state service.
There is no limit — ^in theory — ^to the salary anyone may recieve,^nor
to the amount of captial anyone may accumulate. There are no oppor-
tunities for investment, however, except in state bonds. These bonds
pay interest, exactly as do bonds in capitalist countries, and a good rate
too — eight per cent. Savings banks are encouraged, and in 1935 no
fewer than forty-three million depositors throughout the Soviet Union
used them. They pay eight to ten per cent interest.

Above all, sharp differences are possible in earning power. The janitor
in Sovkino — ^the movie company — gets, perhaps, 1 50 rubles per month ;
the star may get 15,000, Piece-work exists in factories, in order to
encourage production. Artists, literary men, may earn very large sums
for Russia, though there is very little they can do with their incomes —
in paper rubles — rafter they get it. A playwright, Vasily V. Shkvarkin,
author of a bourgeois comedy, Another Man's Child, which swept the

“DURANTY’S INFERNO”

567

provinces, earned 200,000 rubles in royalties a few years ago. A journal-
ist named Michael Koltzoff, editor of the comic paper Oganok (Little
Light), is reputed to earn 30,000 rubles per month. Isvestia, the chief
Soviet newspaper, pays 500 rubles each for feuilletons.

One should keep in mind, however, that big incomes are still ex-
tremely rare. Earning power may vary in the* Soviet Union, according
to artistic or technical proficiency, but the extremes, as Louis Fischer
has pointed out, are very close. No such ‘‘spread’^ is conceivable in the
U.S.S.R. as exists in Britain or America between, say, a clerk in a
factory and its owner. Among’ all the 165,000,000 Russians, there are
probably not ten men who earn $25,000 per year.

And two vitally important elements in this issue of ‘‘socialist in-
equality” should never be forgotten.

1. No man in the Soviet Union has any individual control of the
means of production. A man may accumulate and transfer wealth, but
not the means of producing wealth.

2. No man in the Soviet Union may exploit labor for private profit.
Interest may be paid on bonds, yes, but this interest does not represent
private profits on the use of labor.

These safeguards, as may readily be seen, are so potent that Stalin
has no reason to worry from the “contradictions,” which affect only a
comparatively small percentage of the population, and which were, in
fact, deliberately introduced as a spur to production.

Stampede to Common Sense*^

Peshaps as a result of relaxation from the extreme ardors of the Five-
Year Plans a considerable revaluation of old Soviet values is going on.

The Pravda (shades of Lenin!) has come to print touching editorials
about love and motherhood. Divorce is still easy, but a strenuous effort
is being made to improve the level of family life. Abortions, formerly
encouraged, are now prohibited. Children, once taught to pretend com-
plete independence of their parents, are being encouraged to attitudes
of filial duty and devotion. Alimony payments for the support of chil-
dren of divorced parents are strictly enforced. A new law inflicts im-
prisonment of one year for desertion of a child, and cases of “sexual
hooliganism” may be strictly punished.

In education, a movement led by Stalin himself (who has insisted on
standardized textbooks) has restored examinations in schools and uni-
versities j teachers and professors are encouraged to enforce discipline^

INSIDE EUROPE

568

instead of the opposite; degrees like Ph.D., once abolished, are now
granted again. It was impossible ten years ago to get a liberal education
in the Soviet Union. The whole emphasis was on economics from a
strictly Marxist point of view and on natural science. Now history is
being taught (though from a Marxist point of view of course), geogra-
phy also, and there is a powerful movement to revive interest in study
of the classics. The University of Moscow has courses on Shelley
and Keats.

In regard to the arts, too, something of a counter-revolution has
taken place. In June, 193S, a musical conductor of the extremist type
now considered old-fashioned cut two movements from a symphony
on the ground that they were ''bourgeois/^ He was severely rebuked.
Fashion shows came to Moscow ; so did masked balls, roller skates, and
playthings for children without benefit of propaganda. Shakespeare had
several good seasons in Moscow. A company of Bashkirs from Oren-
burg dazzled the town with a performance of Othello. And the Theater
of the Revolution, for the benefit of the Komsomols, put on Romeo
and Juliet to show the youthful audience what true love should be.
The text was not mutilated. But servants of the Montagues and Capulets
were made to fraternize in the first act — ^to illustrate proper proletarian
solidarity!

What the Boss Thinks

Stalin's own considered definition of the Soviet system is perhaps
worth quoting;

‘‘The Soviet economy,'’ he writes in Leninism (II, p. 307), “means
that:

“i. The power of the capitalist class has been overthrown and has
been replaced by the power of the working class.

“2. The tools and means of production, the land, factories, etc., have
been taken away from the capitalists and handed over to the working
class and to the peasantry,

“3. The development of production is subordinated, not to the prin-
ciple of competition and the safeguarding of capitalist profit, but to the
principle of planned guidance and systematic improvement of the ma-
terial and cultural level of the toilers.

“4. The distribution of the national income takes place — ^in the inter-
ests of systematically raising the material position of the workers and
peasants, and extending socialist production in town and country.

“5. The systematic improvement of the material position of the toilers
tand the ceaseless growth of their requirements (purchasing power) —

“DURANTY’S INFERNO*’ 569

guarantee the working class against crises of overproduction, against
the growth of unemployment, etc.

‘‘6. The working class is the master of the country, working not for
the capitalists, but for its own class.”

Stalin is very eager to point out that the Russian revolution of 1917
differs from all other revolutions in history ift that not a mere transfer
of political sovereignty occurred, not the substitution of one party for
another, but the replacement of one economic order by an entirely differ-
ent one on an international, not a national, basis. This, Harold Laski
has said, is the ‘‘seminal” fact' of modern history.

Stalin thinks that a communist society will eventually have the follow-
ing results :

“a. There will be no private ownership of the means of production,
but social, collective ownership;

there will be no classes or state, but workers in industry and
agriculture managing their economic affairs as a free association of
toilers ;

“c. national economy will be organized according to plan, and will be
based on the highest technique in both industry and agriculture ;

“d. science and art will enjoy conditions conducive to their highest
development ;

the individual, freed from bread and butter cares, and of necessity
of cringing to the ‘powerful of the earth,* will become really free.**

(Stalin On Technology, p. 13)

Stalin considers that the problems of production in both industry and
agriculture have been solved. Now facing him are two other issues —
distribution and transport.

Soviet ** Democracy"*

Radicals enamored blindly of the Soviet cause do it more harm than
good by wantonly inaccurate coloring of information. Recently I read
an argument, citing details of the Soviet “elections,** designed to show
that the U.S.S.R. was more of a democracy than the U.S.A. All the
article omitted to mention was (i) the “vote” was not by secret ballot,
but by show of hands, (2) it “elected” men to serve on a body which
by no conceivable stretch of the imagination could be said to have
legislative powers. Another point — in most communist “elections** there
is only one candidate!

But in the summer of 1936, a new and ostensibly serious effort to-
ward the evolution of Soviet democracy was made. This was the publica-

INSIDE EUROPE

570

tion of the new Constitution, which duly came into force with a
ceremonial sitting of the Congress of Soviets in 1937. The Constitution,
a potentially important document, was drawn up by a committee on
constitutional reform which was set up in July, 1935, and of which
Stalin himself was chairman. The ten vice-chairmen comprised a formida-
ble list of Soviet chieftains: Litvinov, Radek, Vyshinsky, Voroshilov,
Molotov, Bukharin, Akulov (the chief prosecuting attorney, who has
theoretical powers even over the G.P.U.), Chubar, Zhdanov, Kagano-
vitch.^ For a year the committee worked.

The new Constitution set up a two-chamber parliament much like
that of the Western democracies. The Lower House will eventually be
elected by universal popular suffrage (so at least it is asserted), the
Upper House chosen from representatives of the various national
minorities. The parliament will pass laws in the regular manner of
such bodies, call new elections, and, in general, be the source of the
power of the state. This marks a very broad change from the present
system, if it is applied with honest intent.

It is incorrect, incidentally, to repeat the usual assertion that com-
munists form only two per cent of Russia’s population. The proper
figure is nearer ten per cent. In estimating the total population, one
includes babies, children, women; one should do likewise in numbering
the communists. There are about 3,000,000 full adult party members,
and 835,298 candidates. But the Consomols, of whom there are about
4,000,000, the Pioneers, about 6,000,000 and the Octobrists, the chil-
dren, like Mussolini’s Wolf-Cubs, of kindergarten and early school age,
should be included as communists. The general opinion is that the num-
ber of party members is bound soon to be widened, as more and more
Consomols reach party age.

Associated with the issue of ‘‘democracy” throughout the broad spaces
of the Soviet Union is that of exclusive control by Stalin and his men
at the top in Moscow. The ruling directorate is small enough to run a
terrible risk of losing touch with the country as a whole, and as the
present hierarchy congeals into a permanent pyramidal structure, the
chance increases of its isolation from the masses. Russia is ruled by a
party machine. It may become, as some one put it, a dictatorship not
of — ^but over — ^the proletariat.

* Of these, however, Litvinov has lost his job, and Bukharin, Radek, and Chubar
have been purged.

“DURANTY’S INFERNO”

571

Jokes

A peasant queues up to see Lenin’s body in the Red Square mauso-
leum, comes out again. “What did you think of him?” a friend asks.
Reply: “He’s just like us, dead but not yet buried.”

Another peasant watches the construction orf a new short-wave radio
station. The technician explains that any voice in the microphone will
be heard over the entire world. The peasant pleads to be allowed the
supreme thrill of trying it. He asks to be permitted to say just one
word — only one. Permission gff anted. The peasant steps up to the micro-
phone and shouts — “Help !”

The G.P.U. was “liberalized”; all agents were instructed to show
the greatest courtesy to the common folk. A man in a street-car sneezed.
A G.P.U. agent on the platform, peering into the car, snorted angrily,
“Who did that — ^who was it who sneezed?” Terror in the car. Friends
urge the luckless fellow who sneezed to give himself up, confess his sin,
in order to save the whole car from arrest. He speaks up, quavering,
“I sneezed.” The G.P.U. man bellowed: "Gesu^heit” (Your good
health')-

Stalin had lice in his hair. No means, mechanical, medicinal, chemi-
cal, could extirpate them. Desperate, Stalin called Radek into consulta-
tion. Radek said: “Simple. Collectivize one louse. The others will run
away.”

When the intelligentsia and the old “technical bureaucracy” were
being severely scrutinized and punished the joke ran: “My wife and
I have three sons. One is an engineer. The other is a professor of
bacteriology. The third is also in Siberia.”

A horde of rabbits jumped out of the Soviet Union across the Polish
border. The Poles expressed surprise and consternation. “Ah,” the
rabbits explained, “the G.P.U. has issued orders to arrest all giraffes
in Russia.” “But,” remonstrated the Polish customs officers, “you are
not giraffes.” The rabbits replied: “Yes, but try to prove it to the
G.P.U.”

A terrible turmoil was heard outside Stalin’s private office. The boss
was denouncing some one with a tornado of violent epithets. Fifteen
minutes it lasted. The terrified doorman peered within. He looked for
the comrade whom Stalin must have been chastising. No one except
Stalin was there. “Where is the man you were denouncing?” timidly

INSIDE EUROPE

572

inquired the doorman. Stalin replied: ''1 have just finished my daily
quarter of an hour of self-criticism.”

Foreign Affairs

For a long time the foreign policy of the Soviet Union could be
fairly expressed in one word — ^peace. Liberals the world over and even
many conservatives — folk who found it difficult to say a good word
for the Bolsheviks in domestic affairs — ^agreed that Russian foreign
policy during the 30’s was defensive and pacific. The Soviets adopted
a consistently non-aggressive line. They tended to their own business,
and made no inroads elsewhere, except in remote Sinkiang and Outer
Mongolia. They joined the League, they cooperated vividly in the at-
tempt to make Collective Security work.

As well as anyone, Karl Radek has explained Soviet motives in
this period:

^The object of the Soviet Government is to save the soil of the first
proletarian state from the criminal folly of a new war. To this end the
Soviet Union has struggled with the greatest determination and con-
sistency for sixteen years. The defense of peace and of the neutrality
of the Soviet Union against all attempts to drag it into the whirlwind
of a new world war is the central problem of Soviet foreign policy.
The Soviet Union follows the policy of peace because peace is the best
condition for building up a socialist society.”

(Foreign Affairs, January, 1934.)

During most of the last decade it was assumed that the Soviet Union
had two potential enemies, Japan and Germany. As to the Japanese,
the Russians made every kind of concession to appease and mollify
them, for instance the sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Man-
churia for about one-eighth its value. When pressure from Japan was
particularly acute, the Soviets offset it by establishing friendly rela-
tions with the United States. When the Japanese danger receded, the
U.S.S.R., though eager for friendship with America, and delighted at
American recognition, tended to neglect the new rapprochement with
Washington, because it was not so pertinently valuable. Meantime they
repeatedly offered the Japanese a non-aggression pact, which Japan
refused.

As to Russian relations with Germany, it should be remembered
that the phase of acute tension and hostility between the two countries
only began after 1933, when Hitler took power. Before that, for a

“DURANTY’S INFERNO’’

573

long time, the policy of the Soviet Union was predicated on friendship
with Germany. The Soviets hoped for communist revolution there;
Germany, like the U.S.S.R., was practically an outlaw state; the Rus^
sians sympathized with Germany’s struggle to free herself from the
shackles of Versailles; above all, France and Poland — ^back in the
neolithic 2o’s — ^were allies, and allies presumably against Germany and
the Soviet Union. The four countries stretched across Europe, France-'
Germany-Poland-Russia, mutual and successive checks against each
other.

It was very neat. It was tbo neat. It did not last. Hitler ended it.
In 1933, Germany under Hitler seemingly became Russia’s enemy, mor-
tal and implacable; therefore the Russians had to make a quick and
profound bouleversement. First, by surviving the Five-Year plan, they
made themselves valuable militarily as allies. Second, by allowing the
Communist Internationale to languish forlorn, they achieved a sort of
spasmodic respectability. Recognition by the United States, in Novem-
ber 1933, was an important step. Then Litvinov contrived to bring
Russia into the League. There followed the treaties with France and
Czechoslovakia. Anthony Eden visited Moscow and shook hands with
Stalin. Litvinov declared, 'Teace is indivisible,” and Russian com-
missars drank the health of George V of England. God Save the
King! The job was done.

Russia, the outcast, the pariah, the chief of revisionist powers —
certainly the idea of world revolution coimoted revisionism! — ^thus
became, in the short space of three years, the newest addition to the
countries in the status quo group. Not only this. The treaties signed
with Laval of France and Benes of Czechoslovakia were virtually mili-
tary treaties. Concurrently came the congress of the Communist In-
ternationale in Moscow in 1935, the first one in seven years. At this
congress Stalin tossed revolutionary internationalism overboard —
temporarily — ^and the Popular Front phase of communist policy began.
Communists everywhere were instructed to cooperate with bourgeois
parties against threats of war and Fascism.

Collective Security and Popular Frontism persisted till 1939. Then
came the immense shock of the Russo-German pact, one of the cardinal
events in world history this century. Stalin jumped out of one camp
and into the other. The pact helped bring the war. I have already
described it briefly in Chapter IX above.

That Russia should return to collaboration— no matter how sketchy—

INSIDE EUROPE

574

with Germany was sufficiently sensational ; that, immediately after the
outbreak of the war, Russia should invade Poland, enforce demands
on the Baltic states, and attack Finland, was beyond the wildest dreams.

Stalinas speech of March lo, 1939, delivered to the Eighteenth Con-
gress of the communist party, was, however, a clear indication of his
dissatisfaction with the democracies, and his impending withdrawal from
their front. He pointed out that war— "the second imperialist war’' —
had been going on since the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
He pointed out that the non-aggressor democracies were beyond doubt
stronger than the aggressor states, but th^t nevertheless the democracies
continued to give way to them. They surrendered Spain, Czechoslovakia,
parts of China. Why? One reason he adduced was fear of revolution.
Another was that the democracies, no longer interested in collective
security, found that non-intervention, a policy of isolation and neu-
trality, served their best interests. Stalin indicated quite clearly that
he could play this same game. Britain, he implied, played Germany off
against Russia. Very well. Why should not Russia, in turn, play Ger-
many off against Britain?

Stalin’s speech, however clearly it forecast the change in policy he
was planning, certainly did not on the other hand hint at the Russian
invasion of Poland and Russian penetration into the Baltic states. For
he said, "We stand for peaceful, close, and friendly relations with all
the neighboring countries with which we have common frontiers. We
stand for the support of nations which are the victims of aggression
and which are fighting for the independence of their country.”

How long Stalin will continue to cooperate with Germany — on which
issue the fate of Europe presumably depends — ^is unknown. It de-
pends on his central aims. If he is still a revolutionary at heart, if he
still believes in world communism, then Germany serves him a useful
purpose, since Germany is attacking the western capitalist states. He said
in the March speech, "Never forget that we are surrounded by a capi-
talist world.” Over and over again, in all his pronouncements, he
reiterates his belief that this capitalist world is the ultimate enemy.
And he may have come to the conclusion that Hitler, too, is an enemy
of capitalism, that Fascism contains much of radical elements, that
the two revolutions may be useful to one another and may even — con-
ceivably and eventually — emerge.

If Stalin is a simon-pure Russian nationalist, interested in nothing
whatsoever except Russian security, then logic would compel him to

“DURANTY’S INFERNO^' 575

be suspicious of the Germans, in case they should become too strong
on his frontier, with hungry eyes on the Ukraine. Even so, it would
serve his purpose to cooperate with the Germans at least for a time,
since Germany is fighting the British Empire, which from the long
range point of view is a basic Russian enemy. Stalin is a nationalist,
certainly. But nationalists easily become imperialists, as we know only
too well. Stalin may use Germany to a point, then turn on her. He
may turn out to be a ‘‘Marxist’ imperialist,’^ if that phrase has any
meaning.

In any case, no matter what happens, it would seem that the Russians
are in a position to gain. If the allies lose the 1939 war, then the British
Empire is weakened, western capitalism is weakened. If Germany loses
the war, then presumably there will be a revolution in Germany, which
would also serve Russia’s ends. It would weaken or destroy Germany
as a nationalist neighbor, and it might bring communism.

Looking at it in the broadest perspective possible, one can only con-
clude that Stalin wants, above all, to make nationalist Russia strong,
to keep Russia strong, against any possible eventuality. To this end,
he cooperates with Germany to a certain extent, but at the same time
guards very closely against any shift in the situation that might make
Germany his enemy.

THE END

Acknowledgments and Bibliography

ABOUT two-thirds of this book, I should think, is the result of
direct evidence acci^mulated by my own eyes and ears. For the
rest I have a hundred sources to thank. It is difficult to list them. If
the book dealt with a dead instead of a living period, I should have
had merely to consult documents in the regular manner of research.
But I have been dealing with very contemporary figures, and the best
information to be had about them can be collected only by word of
mouth. A book may be written about Napoleon purely from written
records. A chapter about Mussolini, it is obvious on the other hand,
should be based partly on written records, but also on the evidence of
people who know him, have talked to him, and can report their obser-
vations first-hand.

In every capital I have written about, friends and acquaintances
have generously collaborated by giving me a word-of-mouth treasury
of intimate material and ideas. I have winnowed and checked this
material as carefully as possible. The friends who helped me may be
counted by the score. I cannot mention their names, because many
are residents of countries ruled by dictatorship, and it would be in-
vidious to mention some, who might be named freely, and not others.
In addition, other friends have carefully read and checked every part
of the manuscript.

To these loyal and generous colleagues in twenty countries, salaam!
As to books and documents, I have referred to hundreds — ^and I*^must
have read several thousand newspaper and magazine clippings on each
important country — ^but I don’t want to burden this long manuscript
with a formal bibliography. However, the following books have been
particularly valuable, some of them, in fact, indispensable:

Allen, Jay: Spain, Speech before the Chicago Council of Foreign Re-
lations, Chicago, 1936.

Anon)mious : Heil! Bristol, 1934.

Anonymous : Not to Be Repeated, New York, 1932.

Anonymous: Patriotism, Ltd,, London, 1933.

Anonymous : Recovery Through Revolution, New York, 1933.
Anonymous: The Secret International, London, 1932.

Armstrong, H. C.: Grey Wolf, London, 1934.

Armstrong, Hamilton Fish : Europe Between Wars? New York, 1934.

576

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 577

Armstrong, Hamilton Fish; We or They, New York, 1936.

Armstrong, Hamilton Fish: When There Is No Peace, New York, 1939.
Baldwin, Stanley: On England, London, 1926.

Bauer, Otto: Austrian Democracy Under Fire, Prague, 1934.

Benes, Eduard: My War Memoirs, London, 1928.

British Blue Book : Outbreak of Hostilities Between Great Britain and
Germany, London, 1939.

Broad, Lewis and Russell, Leonard: The Way of the Dictators, Lon-
don, 1935.

Capek, Karel: Masaryk Tells His Story, Prague, 1934.

Chamberlain, W. H. : Russia's Ir^on Age, Boston, 1934.

Childs, Marquis W. : Sweden, the Middle Way, New Haven, 1936.
Churchill, Winston: A Roving Commission, New York, 1939.

Churchill, Winston: The World Crisis, London, 1931.

Churchill, Winston: The Aftermath, New York, 1929.

Cole, G. D. H.: Intelligent Man's Review of Europe To-day, London,

^^700*

Crane, John O.: The Little Entente, New York, 1931.

Cnpps, Sir S.: Problems of Socialist Transition, London, 1934.
Daladier, Edouard : Defense du Pays, Paris, 1939.

Dalton, Hugh : Practical Socialism for Britain, London, 1935.
Duranty, Walter; Duranty Reports Russia, New York, 1934.
Duranty, Walter: Europe— War or Peace, London, 1935.

Dutt, R. Palme: Fascism and Social Revolution, New York, 1934.
Eden, Anthony: Places in the Sun, London, 1926.

Finer, Herman ; Mussolini's Italy, London, 1935-
Fischer, Louis: Soviet Journey, New York, 1934.

Fischer, Louis: The War in Spain, New York, 1937.

Fodor, M. W. : South of Hitler, New York, 1939.

Fortune, Italian Number (July, 1934), New York, 1934.

Fox, Ralph: PortMfl'ol Now, London, 1936.

Garratt, Geoffrey T. : Mussolini’s Roman Empire, Indianapolis, 1938.
Gedye, G. E. R.: Heirs to the Habsburgs, Bristol, 1932.

Gedye, G E R. : Betrayal in Central Europe, New York, 1939.
Harris, H. Wilson: What the League of Nations Is, London, 1925.
Heiden, Konrad: A History of National Socialism, London, 1934.
Henri, Ernst: Hitler Over Europe, New York, 1934.

Hitler, Adolf : My Struggle, London, 1933.

Horrabin, J. F. : An Atlcis of Current Affotrs, L-iondon, 1934 *
Horrabin, J. F. : An Atlas of European History, London, 1935.
Howe, Quincy: World Diary, ig2g-igj4> New York, 1934 -
Jackson, J. H ; The Post-War World, London, 1935.

Jerrold, Douglas : England, Bristol, 1935.

Kaganovitch, L. M. : Various Pamphlets, Moscow, I932-I93‘5.
Keyserling, H. : Europe, New York, 1928. « t j

Knidcerbocker, H. R. : Will War Come in Europe. London, 1934 *
Knitch, J. W. : Was Europe a Success? New York, 1934.

INSIDE EUROPE

578

Landau, Rom. : Pilsudski, Hero of Poland, London, 1930.

Laski, H. J. : Communism, London, 1927.

Laski, H. J. : Politics, Philadelphia, 1931.

Lefebvre, Victor: Scientific Disarmament, London, 1932.

Livingston, A. : The Peace Ballot, London, 1935.

Ludwig, Emil: Talks With Mussolini, London, 1933.

Madariaga, S de: Spam, London, 1931.

Markham, R. H. : Meet Bulgaria, Sofia, 1932.

Marsh, Sir Edward: A Number of People, London, 1939.

Martin, William: Europe as I See It To-day, New York, 1931.
Masaryk, T. G. : The Making of a State, London, 1927.

Messinger, J. : Death of Dollfuss, London, 1935.

Mirsky, Dmitri : The Intelligentzia of Great Britain, London, 1935.
Morrison, Herbert : Practical Socialism in Great Britain, London, 1933.
Mosley, Oswald: The Greater Britain, London, 1934.

Mowrer, Edgar A. : Germany Puts the Clock Back, New York, 1933.
Mussolini, Benito : My Autobiography, New York, 1928.

Mussolini, Benito : Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, New York,
I 93 S-

Reed, Douglas: The Burning of the Reichstag, New York, 1934.
Report of Court Proceedings: Case of Trotskyite-Zmovievite Terrorist
Centre, Moscow, 1936.

Report of Court Proceedings : Case of Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre,
Moscow, 1937.

Rintelen, Capt Von: The Dark Invader, New York, 1933.

Rothery, Agnes: Denmark, Kingdom of Reason, New York, 1937.
Rudlin, W. A.: Growth of Fascism in Great Britain, London, 1935.
Russell, Bertrand: Freedom Versus Organization, 1814-1914, New
York, 1934.

Schachtman, Max: Behind the Moscow Trial, New York, 1936.
Schevill, F. : A History of Europe, Chicago, 1926.

Schuschnigg, Kurt: My Austria, New York, 1938.

Siegfried, A. : France, A Study in Nationality, New Haven, 1930.
Siegfried, A. : England's Crisis, London, 1933.

Simonds, Frank H. and Emeny, Brooks : Price of Peace, London, 1935.
Stalin-Wells: Stalin-Wells Talk, London, 1934.

Stalin, J. : Various Pamphlets, Moscow, 1932-1935.

Stalin, Joseph : Leninism, Moscow, 1934.

Stalin and Others : Socialism Victorious, Moscow, 1934.

Stalin, Molotov and Litvinov : Our Foreign Policy, Moscow, 1934.
Steed, Wickham : The Real Stanley Baldwin, London, 1932.

Strachey, John : Menace of Fascism, London, 1934.

Thompson, Dorothy: / Saw Hitler, New York, 1932.

Trevelyan, G. M.: History of England, London, 1927.

Trotsliy, Leon: Where Is Britain Going? London, 1926.

Trotsky, Leon: History of the Russian Revolution, London, 1934.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 579

Trotsky, Leon: The Revolution Betrayed, New York, 1937.

Various Authors: What Would he the Character of a' New War?
London, 1933

Various Authors : Great Contemporaries, London, 1935.

Vergin, Fedor : Subconscious Europe, London, 1932.

‘‘Vigilantes” : Inquest on Peace, London, 1935.

Voigt, F. A. : Unto^ Caesar, New York, 1938. >

Wells, H G : Outline of History, London, 1932.

Werth, Alexander : France in Fernlent, New York, 1934.
Wheeler-Bennett, J. W.. The Disarmament Deadlock, London, 1934.
White, Freda : War in Spatn, a Short Account, London, 1937.

World Committee: Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, London, 1933.
Zimmern, A.: The Third British Empire, London, 1926.

As to pamphlets, those of the Foreign Policy Association (New
York) and of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London)
were most valuable. I am particularly indebted to the Bulletin of In-
ternational News published by the latter. Among newspapers, I used
most the Manchester Guardian, the London Times, the Evening Stand-
ard, and the Daily Telegraph, The diary columns of the latter two were
very helpful. And my debt to the New Statesman in the English chapters
is manifest.

This book has been written fresh and as a whole, and all from a
consistent point of view. I had, of course, covered some of the same
ground in magazine articles, as well as in dispatches to the Chicago
Daily News. Thus I should mention that Vanity Fair gave hospitality
to some early views of Madame Lupescu, Mr. Eden, General Goering,
and others ; Foreign Affairs allowed me to discuss in its pages Dr. Doll-
fuss and the Habsburg problem ; the Nation let me say what I thought
about Central Europe for several years. HarpeFs Magazine published
some of the material in this book on Spain, the Reichstag Fire trial,
and the arms traffic, as well as an essay called “Policy By Murder.” I
have also used a few passages from sections I wrote of an anonymous
book on Europe, called Not To Be Repeated.

I have my newspaper, the Chicago Daily News, to thank for the wide
opportunity it has given me these past dozen years to work in almost
every country in Europe. The News, with its admirable tradition of for-
eign news reporting, gave me a free hand from Scandinavia to Pales-
tine, from Moscow to London and back again, and I spent five eventful
years in Vienna as Daily News correspondent in Central Europe and
the Balkans. Of course the News is not responsible for any sentiments

INSIDE EUROPE

580

or opinions in this book. Nor, except for an occasional sentence, is there
any reproduction of Daily News material. But, for the opportunities
they freely gave me, I have the publisher and editors to thank.

Finally, this book would have been impossible to write except for the
patient and generous collaboration of my wife.

Index

Aaland Islands, 494-495
Abdel-Knm, 174 204
Abdication of Edward VIII, 292, 296 If.
Abereger, 398

Abyssinia, Hoare-Laval plan, 278-280,
341

in League of Nations, 272-273
“spheres of influence,” 272-273, 321 ,
Abyssinian War, 82, 85-86, 177, 188, 196,
224, 235, 239-240, 247, 249, 256, 261,
263, 268 ff , 285, 287, 293, 343, 482,
509-510

Action Frangaise, 183, 192-193,
200 ff.

Adamic, Louis, 458
Adams, Henry, 31
Addis Ababa, 257, 261, 281
Adler, Viktor, 377
Adowa, 261, 271
Adriatic Sea, 467, 470
Afridis, 285
Agadir, 88

Air force, British, 294, 319, 345
Air force, German, 61-66
Air raids, 120, 126

Aitken, William Maxwell, Lord Beaver-
brook, 287, 354
Alba, Duke of, 215, 217
Albania, 263, 270, 321, 468 ff., 515
Italy seizes, 470-471
Albrecht, Dr., 47
Alcazar, siege of, 222
Alexander of Jugoslavia, 25-26, 244,
256, 342, 445, 453 ff-, 472
Alexander III, Tsar, 486
Alexandra, Queen, 440
Alexandria, Egypt, 72-73
Alfonso XIII, 215, 445
Algemeen Handelsbled, 403
Allen, Jay, 223, 227
Allies, 86-87
Almeria, 229, 233

Aloisi, Baron Pompeo, 244, 262, 274
Alpin-Montangedellschaft, 108, 173, 391-
392, 398

Alsace-Lorraine, 176
Amery, L. S., 362

Amman, Max, 6, 9
Anarchists, 214 ff , 228, 230-231, 331
Anderson, Siv John, 345
Andreyer, Audrey A., 538-539, 548
, Anglo-Franco-Turkish treaty, 196-197
Anglo-French naval compromise, 321
Anglo-German naval treaty, 1935, 88,
133, 177, 294, 499

Anglo-Italian “Gentleman’s Agreement,”
258

Treaty of London, 269-2/ , 272
Angriff, 9, 67

Anschluss, 14, 42, 62, 100-102, 108, 178,
377

Anti-Comintern Pact, 84-85, loi, 138,

179

Anti-Fascism, 224 277-278, 295
Anti-Semitism, German, ii, 13-14 27,
61-99; Hungary, 425; Italian, 262;
Russian, 446 ff.

Anti-war strike, Forli, 240
Antony, Mark, 461
Aosta, Duke of, 260
“Appeasement,” 132, 196, 343
Araquistain, Luis, 216
Aras, Dr. Tewfik, 482
Arbeifer Zeifung, 389, 391, 393, 416
Aristotle, 380, 500

Armstrong, Hamilton Fish, 15, 512
Arnold, 555

Aryanism, 8, 17, 27, 65-66, 7i-73» 93
Asquith, 291, 354
Assassination, 11-12, 459 ff.

Astor, Lady, 287, 338, 520
Astrology, 6
Asturias, revolt, 218
Ataturk, Mustapha Kamal. (See Kamal)
Atlee, Major Clement, 306, 357, 36o^
361

Austria, 1-4, 82, 133, 178, 237, 377 ff.,
436, 461, 513, 515

Anschluss, 14, 42, 62, 100-102, 108, 178,
377

German gains from annexation, 108
German reorganization, iii
independence guaranteed, 105
Nazis, 18, 105 ff., 381

INDEX

582

Austria — ( Continued)
seizure, 85-86, 104, 107-108, 266, 270,

313, 414

social democrats suppressed, 18, iii,
379

visit of Edward VIII, 296
Austria-Hungary, 377-378, 428
Austro-German agreemenf, July, 1936,
90

Austro-German customs union, 35
Authority complex, 24-26
Auvergne, 184, 188, 208
Avanti, 237 ff.

Avenol, Joseph, 510-511
Averescu, General, 447
Ayala, Ramon Perez de, 216
Azana, Manuel, 216-219, 230

Bap% Major, 404
Badajoz, massacre, 222, 228
Baden-Baden, 75
Badoglio, Marshal Pietro, 261
Baedeker, Russia (1914), 562
Bakhunm, 229-230

Balabanov, Madame Angelica, 236-237
Balance of power, 292-293
Balbo, Italo, 239, 255-256, 259-262
Baldwin, Alfred, 314
Baldwin, Mrs., 306, 317
Baldwin, Oliver, 318
Baldwin, Stanley, 279-280, 285 ff., 313 ff.,
342

abdication crisis, 299 ff.

•foreign policy, 321
Balearics, 232

Balkan Entente, 270, 451, 474
Balkan Pact, 270
Balkan states, 96, 125, 437
Baltic States, xix, 93, 134, 178, 491 ff.,
512, S15, 574

Bank of England, 96, 284, 286, 351, 364
Bankes, Sir John Eldon, 174
Bankers, 10, 153, 168, 190
Banks, Russia, 566

Banque de France, 54, 153, 164, 166 ff.,
183, 205, 291

Barcelona, 120, 180, 214, 221, 224-225,
228-230

Baring, Maurice, 88
Barnes, Ralph, 565-566
Barthou, Louis, 178-179, 187, 460
Bartlett^ Vernon, 15, 2^4

Basques, 214, 218-219, 224, 229
Bauer, Dr. Otto, 387, 389 ff.

Bavaria, 3, 5, 15, 51, 61, 64, 266, 387
Bayonne bonds, 193, 201
Bayreuth Festival, 4
Beatty, Admiral, 345
Beaverbrook, Lord (See Aitken, W. M.)
Bee et Ongles, 179-180
Beck, Col. Joseph, 135-136; 142-143, 193,
48s, 487, 489 ff*, 493
Beck, Dr., 51
Beck, Ludwig, 80
Becket, Thomas a, 240
Beckett, Sir Gervase, 342
‘‘Beer-hall Putsch.” (See Munich
Putsch)

Bela Kun, 424, 464

Belgium, 82-83, 140, 176, 178, 387, 502 ff.
invasion, 285
neutrality, 504
Belgrade, 462, 469 ff.

Belmonte, Cardinal Granato di, 264
Benedict XV, peace plan, 265
Benes, Dr., 116, 122-123, 126-127, 420,
432 ff , 511, 535, 573
Benjamin, Rene, 227-228
Benn, Wedgewood, 331
Beran, Rudolf, 436

Berchtesgaden, 2, 6, 22, 105-107, 118-
119, 135, 140
agreement, 122-123
Bergery, Gaston, 210-211
Bergson, Henri, 158
Beria, L. P., 539 , 549
Berlin, 5, 29, 33, 64, 94 , 142-144, 266
“clean-up,” 55-58, 62
Jews, attacks on, 69, 75-76
opera, 68

Reichstag fire trial, 46-50
Sport-Palast meeting, 76
Bernacek, 393
Bernard, Tristan, 158
Bernadotte, Marshal, 499
Bernays, Robert, 335, 362
Bernhard, Prince of Lippe-Biesterfeld,

505

Bessarabia, 452-453
Bethlen, Count Stephen, 424
Bevan, Aneurin, 360
Bevan, Ernest, 359
Bianchi, 258

Bibesco, Princess Elizabeth, 156

INDEX 583

Bilbao, 221, 224, 229
Birchall, Frederick, 503
Birkenhead, Lord (F. E. Smith), 314,
318, 332

Birmingham, 309 ff
Birth-rate, British, 289
French, 175
German, 175
Italian, 268

Bismarck, 42, 125, 138-139, 428
Black shirts. {See SS)

Black Shirts, English, 364
Black-and-Tans, 372
Blitzkrieg, 1 17

Blomberg, Col General Werner von,
31, 61, 79"8 o, 85, 102-103
'‘Blood bath ” {See June 30 murders)
Bluecher, Marshal, 561
Blum, Leon, 122, 146, 152 ff., 156 ff.,
182, 194, 207 ff
attacks arms traffic, 174
character, 160-16?
devalues franc, 164
Popular Front, 162-164
Blum, Madame (Therese Pereira), 160
Boch-Galhan, 91
Boer war, 326, 352
Bogdanoff, 520
Bohemia, 113, 125, 129, 434
Bohemia-Moravia, protectorate, 130, 132,
426,^ 436

Bolshevik vs. Menshevik, 525
Bolsheviks, I33-I34, I97» 449- {See also
U.S.S R )

Bolsheviks, Old, 550, 553 ff,

Bolshevism, 68, 239, 267, 293-294, 387

Bonnet, Georges, 116, 120, 126, 154, 193

Books, burning of, 67

Borah, Senator, 431

Boris III of Bulgaria, 455, 471 ff.

Bose, Fritz von, 51-52, 90
Botha, General, 326
Bouisson, 182

Bowes-Lyon, Elizabeth, 308
Boycott, anti-Jewish, 75
Boy-Ed, Captain, 91
Bradford, Bishop of, 299-300
Branting, Hjalmar, 500
Bratianu, George, 447-448
Bratianu, Jon, 439-440
Bratianu family, 438-439
Bratislava, 129, 136

Brauchitsch, Colonel General Heinrich
von, 80, 103
Braun, 37

Braunau, Austria, 20, 22
Braunthal, 394
Bredow, General von, 51-52
Brenner Pass, 108-109, 1I3, 384-385,
467

Brest-Litovsk, treaty of, 559
Briand, Aristide, 162, 177, 183-184, 186,

239

Briey Valley, 173
Brihuega, 224

Britain. {See Great Britain)

Britford, Unity, 8

British Blue Book, 136, 138, 141

Browder, Earl, 153

Brown Book, 45

Brown Shirts. {See SA)

Brown Terror, 42, 62, 64, no. {See also
Naziism)

Brubaker, Howard, 42, 437, 543
Bruckner, Hitler’s bodyguard, 6, 11-12,
IS, 75

Bruning, Dr. Heinrich, 31-36, 38, 41,
51-52, 58, 186
deflation policy, 32
Brunswick, 29
Brutus, 461
Bubnov, 523
Bubnov, Madame, 546
Bucharest, 133, 438
Budapest, 125
Buenos Aires, 77

BU.F. (British Union of Fascists), 364
Bukharin, 517, 530, 547, 560-561
Bulgar-Greek conflict (1926), 508
Bulgaria, 151, 173, 370, 436, 461, 464,

471 ff.

Bulletin of International News, 226, 248,
388

Bullitt, William C, 148, 534
Buresch, Dr., 381
Burgin, Leslie, 345
Burne-Jones, 314

Caballero, Largo, 216, 230-231
Caesar, Julius, 246, 250-251, 330
"( 3 agoulards,” 205
Caillaux, Joseph, 182, 186, 192
Calinescu, Armand, 447
Calmette, Gaston, 192

INDEX

584

Camarilla, palace, German, 34-36, 3S
Rumania, 442 ff
Cambon, Jules, quoted, 82
Cambridge, 286, 290, 315, 3Si
Camelots du Roi, 207
Cameroons, 176
Canada, 88, 277
Candtde, 227

Cannes Conference, 239, 245
Canterbury, Archbishop of, 7S» 290, 307-
308

Capek, Karel, 431, 433-434
Capitalism, 5 12-5 15
and Fascism, 99, 252, 359
laisscs-jaire, 348
problem of reform, 153
in Sweden, 497
in U.S.S R., 559, 568
Caporetto, 271
Capus, Alfred, 158
Carbuccia, Horace de, 207
Carlists, Spain, 214
Carnarvon, Lord, 247
Carnegie, Mrs. W H , 312
Carol, King of Rumania, 438 ff., 472
Carpentras, 149-150
Casado, General, 226
Castiglione, Camillio, 412
Castillo, Lieutenant, 221
Catalan autonomy, 180, 214, 218, 229
Catholic party, Austria, no
France, 183 ff.

Germany, 42, 51
Catholic Youth Movement, 51
Catholics, 17, 35» I97 ff-, 266, 379
Hitler’s war on, 9, 266
Spain, 214, 221-222
Caucasus, 527-528

Cecil, Lord Hugh, 278, 321, 329, 343
Censorship in England, 288-300, 305-306
in Germany, 67-69
Center party, French, 195-196
German, 40

C.G.T. (Confederation Gen6rale du
Travail), 21 1

Chamberlain, Arthur Neville, 155, 258,
291, 309 ff , 328-329, 347, 353
Berchtesgaden, 118-122
bilateral pact with Hitler, 127
Czechoslovakia, 115
Italy, 104

letter to Hitler, 140-141

Chamberlain, Arthur N eville— - ( Cow-
tinned)

Munich, 127-128. {See also Munich)
pledge to Poland, 132-133, 135
second visit to Hitler, 123
speech, Sept. 27 (1938), 126
Sept. 28, 121, 126-127
Chamberlain, Mrs. Neville (Annie
Cole), 310

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 17
Chamberlain, Joseph, 309-310
Chamberlain, Sir Austen, 273, 292, 309-
- 310, 317, 342

Chamberlain, W. H, 518, 527, 564
Chambre, Guy le, 14S
Chambrun, Count Rene de, 188
Charlemagne, 93
Charles I, 285, 303
Chatfield, Admiral Lord, 345
Chautemps, Camille, 148, 164-165, 182-
183, I9i» 200 ff.
dienier, Andre, 341
Cheron, Henri, 193
Chesterton, G. K , 298
Chlappe, Jean, chief of police, 191, 193,
201-203, 207-208
Chicago Daily News, 579-580
Chicago Tribune, 223
Chicherm, 544
Childs, Marquis, 496-497
Chilston, Lord, 534
China, 574

Chinese Eastern Railway, 572
Christian, King of Denmark, 498
(Christianity, 10, 267
Church in Spain, 216 ff.
attacks on, 228
disestablished, 217
Religious Orders Bill, 218
Church of England, 284, 299, 305-306
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 289, 323, 32=1
Churchill, Randolph, the younger, 332
Churchill, Sarah, 332
Churchill, Winston, American, 330
(Churchill, Winston, 79, 289, 303, 312-
313, 323 ff.

characteristics, 322 ff., 331-334
First Lord of Admiralty, 327 ff.
Hitler, sees danger of, 328
Irish settlement, 328
painting, 327, 332
quoted, 123, 321-323, 339

INDEX

585

Giurchill, Mrs. Winston (Hozier), 332
Chvalkovsky, Dr, 129
Ciano, Count Constanza, 257
Ciano, Count Galeazzo, loi, 242, 257-
258, 262, 278
Cinema, German, 67-68
Citrine, Sir Walter, 359-360
Citroen, 166-167
Civil service, English, 282, 287
French, 183
Clapier, M, 148

Clemenceau, 147, 151, 155, 162, 183, 189,
192-197, 461
Qichy riots, 206
Qiveden, 287
Clydesiders, 335, 361
Clynes, J R , 335

C.N T. (Confederacion Nacional de
Trabajo), 229-230
Code Napoleon, 167
Codreana, Cornelieu, 446
Coigny, Aimee ce, 341
Cole, G. D H., 284

Collective security, 100, 104 179, 210,
276, 293, 545, 572-574
Collectivization, 517, 527 ff , 565
Colijn, Dr. Hendrilras, 504-505
Cologne, 77» 89

Colonies, 52, 83, 89, 100, 274-276
German claims, 86, 142
Italian claims, 268-271
Comert, Pierre, 51 1
Comintern, 539

Comite, des Forges, 169 ff., 200 ff.
Communism, 293-294
Communist party, 10, 38, 42, 68, 212
Austria, no
Danube, 464
England, 355

France, I52-I54» 162, 179, 186, 212
Germany, 43 ff , 63, 266
Greece, 475

Russia, 61, 138. (See also U.S.S.R.)
Spain, 214 ff., 230

Communist Party congress (1939) f 574
Comoedia, 158

Concentration camps, 47, 64, 74
Concordats, 266
Condescu, General, 450
Condor Legion, 224, 226
Congo, 194

Congress of Vienna, 402

Conscription, 13, 78, 86, 177-178
Conservative party, British, 310, 317,

327

Constantine, King of Greece, 439
Constantinescu, 460

Constitutionalism, in England, 303-304
Cooperatives^ 496 ff.

Cordoba, 229

Cork, Lord Mayor of, 275
Corporative state, 251 ff., 359, 385, 395,
420

Corridor. (See Polish Corridor)
Cosgrave, 366 ff
Cot, Pierre, 191-192, 206-207
Coty, 166-167

Credit Anstalt, collapse, 378-379

Creusot, arms firm, 168, 171

Crimean War, 275

Cripps, Sir Stafford, 355, 358

Cristea, Miron, 447

Croats, 25, 1 13, 370, 426, 461 ff.

Croix de Feu, 164, 191, 203 ff.

Cromwell, Oliver, 324
Cross, Ronald H, 346
Crowther, Miss, 453
Cuba, 325

Cummings, A. J., 357, 359
Currency, common, 196
Curtius, 378

Curzon, Lord, 285, 291, 317
Curzon, Lady Cynthia, 363
Customs union, 196
Austro-German, 35, 378-379
British Empire, 337
Czaky, Count Stephen, 425
Czecho-Slovak unity pact, 429
Czechoslovakia, 85-86, 100, 133, 178-179,
341, 420-421, 428, 512, S15, 574
accepts Hitleris terms, 121-123
arms exports, 172
betrayal, 118 ff., 155
democracy, ii2, 125
dismemberment, 127 ff.
encircled, 108, 383

German occupation, 42, 100, 103, 120^
126-127, 130-131, 177
German parties, 114-115
minorities, 112-118
(See also Little Entente)
Czechoslovaks, march to Pacific, 428

Ddil Eireann, 367, 372

INDEX

586

Daily Express, 241, 287, 354
Daily Herald, 245, 365, 385
Daily Mail, 3, 274, 287, 364
Daladier, fidouard, 116, 120, 126-127,
145 if, 165, 182, 190-192, 196, 202-
203, 208 ff.

characteristics, 147-150
Munich, 154 ff*
posts, 150-151
prime minister, 154
turn to right, 154
war minister, 146, 150, 153
Daladier, Madame (Laffont), 140
Dalimier, Albert, 193
Dalton, Hugh, 282, 353, 35$
d'Annunzio, 258, 260
Danube River, 108, 378
Danubian pact, 178

Danzig, 17, 132-136, 140, 142, 144 281,
494

“don’t die for,” 208
League administration, 509
Darbley, Robert, 168
Dardanelles, 174, 325, 327, 482
Darre, R. Walter, 19, 61, 77
Daudet, Leon, 207
Davidson, J C C, 315
Dawes Plan, 190, 339
Dawson, Geoffrey, 287, 291, 294
De Bono, Marshal Emilio, 255-256, 261
d’Eichtal, William and Adolphe, 168
De la Rocque, Count Pierre, 204
De la Rocque, Lieut.-Col. Casimir,
204 f

de la Warr, Earl, 312
de Valera, Eamon, 307, 366 ff.
president Dail Eireann, 372-373
prime minister of Eire, 376
rejects treaty, 373
de Valera, Mrs., 368-369
de Valera, Vivian, 368
De Vecchi, 255
Deat, Marcel, 161, 208
Decamp, General, 148
Deflation, 35, 95, 169-170
Degrelle, Leon, 504
Dell, Robert, 185

Democracy, 20a If., 269, 281, 374, S13-
514

Russian, 569 E
and war, 331
Democracies, 249, 263

Democratic Alliance (France), 196
Democratic theory, 16
Denam, General, 178
Denmark, 86-87, I74, 496 ff.

Department stores, 10, 13, 163, 390
Derby, Lord, 291, 348
Deutsch, Col. Julius, 387, 390
Deutschland, pocket-battleship, 233
Dewey (John) commission, 556
Dictators, 68-^, 104, 263, 270, 313, 424,
493

Dollfuss, 382
'England, 285
Kamal, 478-479
Kings as, 474
Pilsudski, 484, 486
Russia, 562. (See also Stalin)
systems survive, 251
Dietrich, 6
Dietz, 403
Dimitrescu, 442

Dimitri jevitch, Col. Dragutin, 465
Dimitrov, 45-47, 49
Diplomatische Korrcspondenz, 114
Disarmament, 83, 87, 190, 343» 5ii
conference, 337-338, 350, 356
Disraeli, Benjamin, 76, 318, 366
Djemal, 480
Dobler, 399
Doebritz, 54

Dollfuss, Dr. Engelbert, 4, 18, 24-26, 88,
90, 105, 256
chancellor, 380 ff
characteristics, 380-381
dictator, 235, 382 ff.
murder, iio-iii, 251, 381, 397, 402 E
Domingo, Marcelino, 220
Dorgeres (d’Halluin), Henri, 209
Doriot, Jacques, 208-209
Dostoevsky, 431
Doumer, 199

Doumergue, Gaston, 169, 178, 182-18'*,
206, 208, 21 1
Draga, Queen, 456, 464
Drang nach Osten, 275
Dresden, 73
Dreux, Alexandre, 173
Drexler, Anton, 3, 27-28
Dreyfus case, 158-159
Drummond, Sir Eric, 510
Dubarry, 201
Duca, Jon, 442-446

INDEX

587

Duchemin, Rene, 168
Duff Cooper, Alfred, 290, 312, 346
resigns, 347

Duff Cooper, Lady Diana, 346-347
Dukas, Paul, 160

Duranty, Walter, 517, 520-521, 524, 531,
547, 562 ff.

Dutch Communist Youth Organization,
44

Dzherghinsky, 549 ^ ’

Dzhugash, Ekaterina, mother of Stalin,
522

East Prussia, 136, 494

Easter rebellion (1916), 366, 368, 371

“Eastern Locarno,” 178

Ebert, 33, 35

Ebro River, 224

Eckart, Dietrich, 93

Eckermann, 158

Eden, Anthony, 14-15, 54, 84, 156, 274
ff., 312, 534-535, 573
resigns, loi, 104, 109, 341 ff.

Eden, Edward, 341
Eden, William Nicholas, 341
Edge, Walter, 180

Edward VIII, King of England, 292,
296 ff.

abdication, 292, 296 ff.

Austria, visit to, 296
Mrs. Simpson, 297 ff.
radio farewell, 304-307

Egypt, 104, 275, 277-278, 370
Eher (Franz) & Co., 9
Eibel, Chptain, 404-405
Eidemann, General, 559
Eire, 376. (See also Irish Free State)
Elections, British (1929), 356
(1931), 288, 359-360
(1935), 278, 300, 319, 321, 360 ff.
"Safety First,” 321
Elena, Queen, 256
Elizabeth, Empress, 460
Elizabeth, Queen, 308
Ellenbogen, 237
Elliot, Walter, 290, 347-348
Emancipation Nationale, 208-209
Embargoes, 232, 278, 280
"Encirclement,” 131
Ender, Dr., no

England, a nation, 30. (See also Great
Britain)

Enver, 480

Epstein, 63

Eritrea, 272-273

Erkko, Juho, 492

Ernst, Karl, 49, 50-51, 54-55

Espionage, 91

Essad Pasha, 468-469

Esterhazy family, 421

Estonia, 93, 492-493

Ethiopia, loi, 224, 242, 251, 257-258,
271-272, 414
Eton, 286, 351
Europa, steamship, 119
Evening Standard, 332, 354
Exchange Equalization Fund, 312, 353
Expansionism. (See Imperialism)

Ezhof, 521

F.A.L (Federacidn Anarquista Ibera),
231

Fabian socialists, 347, 35S> 361
Fabre, Emile, 202

Falangistas. (See Fascists, Spain)
Famine, Russia (i933)> 527
Farinacci, Roberto, 239, 259
Faman, 369

Fascism, 179, 281, 5i3» 5^5
merges with Commimism, 138, 574
opposition to. (See Anti-Fascism;
Popular Front)

Fascist International (Fascintern), I02
Fascists, Belgium, 504
England, 358 ff , 362 ff .

France, iS3, 163-164, 170-171. I95»
197, 200 ff.

Hungary, 424
Ireland, 374
Italy, 238 ff.

program, 251-254
Rumania, 442 ff.

Spam (Falangists), 213 ff., 226
Fatherland Front, 385, 416
Faupel, General, 223
Faure, Paul, 173
Feder, Gottfried, 3,^ 27-28
Federation des Anciens Combattants, 207
Federation of Europe, 515
Feldman, General, 559-56o
Ferdinand, King of Rumania, 430-44O»

446, 449 ^ « o

Fqt, Major Emil, iio-iii, 38S> 387"389>
394-395, 400. 403

INDEX

588

Fiedler, 50
^‘Fifth Column,” 228
Figaro, 192-193
Figueras, 225

Finer, Dr, 237-238, 241, 249, 260
Finland, xx, xxi, 492 ff , 505
attack on, 500, 515
Fischer, Louis, 219, 567 ^

Fisher, Sir Warren, 287
Five-Year Plan, 263, 518, 526-528, 530,
S3S, 561, 563 ff.

Flandin, Pierre-Etienne, 160, 169, 178,
182-183, 187, 195-196
Planner, Janet, 202, 209
Flemish provinces, 502
Floyar-Rajchmann, Henri, 485
Foch, Marshal Ferdinand, 175, 197-198,
204

Fock, Baroness Karin, 62-63
Fodor, M W , 401, 476
Foerster, 140

Pontages, Madame de, 242
Force, concept of, 249
Foreign policies, England, 292-293, 321
France, 168-181
Germany, 87
Hungary, 426
Mussolini’s, 270, 280-281
Poland, 491
U.S.S.R., 572 if.

Fortune, 247
Four- Power Pact, 270
"Four-Year” plan, German, 63
Franc, 164, 183

France, 30, 68, 82-83, 96, 105, 238, 437,
491, 51S

aid Czechoslovakia, 116 if , 155

alliances, 452

arms exports, 172

and balance of power, 293

birth rate, 175

esprit, 180-181

Fascist Spain weakens, 223

foreign policy. (See Foreign policies)

Hitler, united against, 87

mobilizes, 140

Munich, effects of, 128

national income, 284

Non-Intervention Pact, 23a

pacts desired by, 178

pledge to Poland, 132-133

political system, 182 ff.

F ranee — ( Continue^

Stresa front, 88
wish for security, 175-176
France, Anatole, 158
“Francistes,” 206
Franco, Gen Francisco, 154, 281
executions by, 226
recognition, 85, loi
revolt, 214 if.
totalitarian state, 227
Franco-Belgian-German frontier, 82
Franco-Czech security treaty, 179
Franco-Russian non-aggression treaty
(1932), 190, 452

Franco-Soviet pact (i935), 82, 178-179,
560

Frangois-Marsal, 182

Franconia, 75-76

Frank, Dr., 384

Frank, Jerome, 468

Franke, Dr. Emil, 200

Franz Josef, Emperor, 419, 422-423

Frauenfeld, 397, 41 1

Frederick, Crown Prince of Denmark,
498

Freemasons, 183, 200, 202, 214, 219 ff.
French Revolution, 190
Freud, Dr. Sigmund, 110
Frick, Friedrich, 92
Frick, Dr Wilhelm, 19, 28, 61, 71-72
Fritsch, General Werner Freiherr von,
79-80, 103

"Front Paysan,” 209
Front Populaire, I5i-i54» I57, 162-163,
166, 170, 179, 183, 192, 199; 200 ff.,
515

Frot, Eugene, 191-192, 203, 208
Fuhrer Prinsip (Leader Principle), 16-
17, 50, 61, 206
Funder, Dr., 403, 410
Funk, Dr. Walther, 99

Gallagher, Willie, 361
Gamelin, General Maurice, 198
Gandhi, 100, 340, 350, 362
Garrigue, Charlotte, 430
Garry, 518

Garvin, J. L , 228, 287, 321, 349
Gasparri, Cardinal, 265-266
Gasset, Jose Ortega y, Revolt of the
Masses, 216

INDEX

589

Gauch, Professor Herman, New Bases
of Racial Research, 69
Gdynia, 140, 494
Gedye, G. E. R., 387, 402
General strike, 321, 33 i, 348 , 350 , 389,
392 ff.

Genet, 275

Geneva, 77 , 189-190, I 93 , 216, 225, 237,
262-274, 336-337, 342, 350, 507

544

naval conference, 321
193s crises, 244
protocol, 321

George, King of the Hellenes, 290, 475-
476

George V, King of England, 291, 298,
573

George VI, King of England, 308, 313
Georges, General Alphonse, 198
Georgiev, Vlada, 459-46o
Gerl, Josef, 396
German Steel Trust, 92, 94
German Workers Party, 2!j
Germany, 151, 178

Anti-Comintem Pact, 84-85, loi, 138,

179

Austria seized by. {See Austria)
and balance of power, 297
birth-rate, 175
blockade, 328

Czechoslovakia invaded by. {See
Czechoslovakia)
defeat in 19x4, n, 30
disunion, 30-31

expansionism, 93, iX4» 128, 513
Hitler*s religion, 9-1 1
inflation, 32
leaves League, 100, 177
national income, 284
nationalism, 30-31
Poland invaded by. {See Poland)
Spain, intervention in, 213-214, 223 ff.,
232

‘‘unifying,” 17, 80

war guilt. {See War guilt)

{See also Russian purges)

Gestapo, 73-74
Gheorgiev, Col. Kimon, 473
Gibraltar, 222, 232, 346
Gibson, Miss, 246
Gide, Andre, 158
Giolitti, 256, 260

Giovanna of Savoy, 471-472
Giunta, 258
Giurati, 259
Gladstone, W. E , 309
Glasgow, 296, 335
Glasl-Horer, Anna, 21-22
Gleichschaltmg, 9, 42, no
Gobineau, 17'

Godesberg, 123-125

Goebbels, Dr. Joseph Paul, 6, 8, 15, 19,
55, 60 ff., 72, 92, 103, 378
anti-Semitism, 66, 70, 98
crippled, 66, 70
Gauleiter for Berlin, 61
Goering, rivalry with, 68
press war against Poland, 134
propaganda, 67-70
quoted, 71

and Reichstag fire, 49
suppresses Schaclit’s speech, 98
Goebbels, Frau, 8 , 66
Goemboes, Geneial Julius, 422-425
Goering, Marshal Hermann, 6, 12, I5,
37, 72-73, 85, 9x, 93^ y8, 102-103,
^ 130, 258, 378, 425
air force, 62-66, 80, 177
“clean-up” in Berlin, 54-58, 62
Czech treaty (i 925 )» X22
early career, 61-63
Hitler’s successor, 19, 255
jobs, 63
police head, 60
and Reichstag fire, 44-50
replaces Schacht, 99
reviews Condor Legion, 226
rivalry with Goebbels, 68
and Schleicher murder, 52
and Vienna terror, in
Goethe Hof, 389-391
Goga, 447

Gold standard, 164, 166, 170, 269, 337 #
3 S 2 - 3 S 3

Gorecki, Gen. Roman, 485
Gorgulov, assassin, 199
Gorki, 555
Gort, Viscount, 346
G.P.U., 548 ff., 557 , 571
Granada, 229

Grandi, Dino, 104, 239, 256, 262, 273
Graz, 107

Graziani, General Rudolfo, 261

INDEX

590

Great Britain, 82 ff, 151, 196, 225, 575
and Abyssinia. (See Abyssinia)
Admiralty, 286
arms exports, 172
and Austrian seizure, 109
constitutionalism, 303-304
currency devaluation, 337
and Czechoslovak crises; IIS, 118 ff.
Domimons, 277, 292-293, 301-302, 348
foreign policy, 292, 321
franc, support of, 164
Greece, guarantee to, 476
guarantees, 132-133, 452, 476
imperialism. (See Imperialism)
Locarno treaty. (See Locarno)
monarchy, 291 ff.
national income, 282 ff
navy, 270, 276, 282, 286, 288, 293, 508
Non-Intervention Pact, 232-234
“perfide Albion”? 273-281
Poland and, 132-133, I37, I39 ff.
pro-German influences, 293 ff,
rearmament, 289, 294-295
Ribbentrop’s mistake, ^
ruling classes, 282 ff.

Rumania, guarantee to, 452
Stresa front, 88, 177, 336
War Cabinet, 343 ff.
week-end houses, 282 ff .

Greece, 96, 133, 270, 290, 474*476, 481

Greenwood, Arthur, 361

Greiser, 281

Gringotre, 207, 275

Groener, General, 36

Gruhn, Erika, 102

Grynszpan, Herschel, 70

Guadalajara, 224

Guerard, Albert, quoted, 182-183

Guernica, 120, 224-225

Guidi, Donna Rachele, 241-242

Guise, Due de, 204

Guitrys, 158

Gunther, Frances, 14, 85, I 7 S, 187, 391-

392, 417

Gustav, King of Sweden, 498-499

Haakon, King of Norway, 498
Habicht, Herr, 384, 386, 388, 397, 411-

412

Habsburg family, no, 395, 415, 418 ff.,

431

Habsburg, Archduke Anton, 444

Habsburg, Archduke Franz Ferdinand

418-419, 465

Habsburg, Crown Prince Rudolf, 418
Habsburg, Prince Otto von, 418 ff.
Hacha, President, 129, 143, 435
cedes Czech independence, 129-130
Hackitt, Francis, 237, 244, 248
Hadzidimov, 459
Hague agreements, 97
Hague Court, 122, 4^

Haig, Field-Marshal Lord, 347
Haile Selassie, Emperor, 273-274, 281
Haldane, Lord, 87

Halifax, Lord (Lord Irwin), 106, 108-
109, 134, 136, 138, 142-143, 312, 340,
343

appeal to Warsaw and Berlin, 144
visit to Hitler (1937), 100
Hamburg, 93

Hammerstein, General von, 33
Hammond, J. L and Barbara, 363
Hanfstaengl, Dr. Ernst Franz Sedgwick
(Putzi), 4-5, 7, 68, 74-75
Hankey, Sir Maurice, 287-288, 291
Hansard, 315
Hansson, Per Albin, 500
Hanum, Latife, 481
Harrow, 286, 325
Hart, Captain Liddell, 344
Harvard, 74
Hans Wechenfeld, 5
Haushofer, Professor, geographer, 72
Have-Nots, 28, 86, 178
‘‘Haves,” 178
Hayn, Hans, 51
Hearst press, 243
Hecht, Ben, 507
Hedvicek, 408
Heidelberg, University, 66
Heiden, Konrad, History of National
Socialism, 3, 10, 14, 16, 27, 50, 66
lieil, 77

Heimwehr, Austrian, no, 379, 385 ff.,
414-41S

Heines, Edmund, 16, 49, 5i> 56-57, 72
Helene, Queen of Rumania, 439-440,
444, 449-451
Heli, 3

Helldorf, Count Wolf von, 76-77
Henderson, Arthur, 289, 33S, 356, 362

INDEX

59 ^

Henderson, Sir Nevile, 2, 19, 120, 134-

135, 138, 140-144

flight to London, 142
report, 142
Henkel, Anna, 89

Henlein, Konrad, Ii 4 "ii 5 » 120-121, 435
‘‘Karlsbad” demands, 116-117
Henry II, 240
Henry VIII, 305
Hereditary Farms Act, 77
Herr, Lucien, 158

Herriot, fidouard, 148, 158, 182-184, 189-
192

Hess, Rudolf, 6, 15, 19, 61, 72 ff., 97 ,
103, 255, 547

named in Russian trials, 556
Heydrich, 74

Hiedler, Johann Georg, 21
Hildburghausen, 28-29
Himmler, Heinrich, 52, 54, 56, 61, 73-75
Hindeiiburg, Field-Marshal Paul von, 5,
16-17, 28, 32 ff , 90, 242
and Bruning, 35-36
death, 58-59, 4I2
and Hitler, 40
reelection, 35
sues Goebbels, 67
Hindenburg, Oskar von, 33-34, 3^
Hirtenberg arms scandal, 108, 386
Hitler, Adolf, 25 ff., 65 ff.. 79 , iSh I 55 -
156, 182, 223 ff., 243, 247, 250, 266,
269, 294, 337. 378, 513
army, reorganizes, 80, 103
art, interest in, 142, 198
Austria, seizure by. (See Austria)
becomes German, 28-29
Chamberlain and, 118-127
chancellor, 39-41
characteristics, 1-14
Churchill sees peril of, 328, 332
conscription, 78

Czechoslovakia seized by, I 28 -I 3 i«
(See also Czechoslovakia)
dictator, 44

and Dollfuss murder ( 5 ^^ Dollfuss)
debut, 27-28

Eastern Europe Security pact, opposed
by, 178

electoral victory, first, 35
family tree, 21-23

Fascist International, pivot of, 102
fcither and mother, 21-24

Hitler, Adolf — (Continued)

French view of, 180-181
friends, 6-7

Godesberg ultimatum, 1 23-125
Hacha interview with, 1 29-130
Halifax, terms to, 100- loi
Henderson, interviev^s with, 140 ff.
and Hinder^jurg, 37
insurance against assassination, 11-12
June 30 murders, 14, 16, 26, 54“S8, 72,
102, 240, 246, 542
Mehrer (Aggrandizer), 131
Memel seized by, 131
money, attitude toward, 8-9
Munich Putsch, (See Munich Putsch)
and Mussolini, 85, 246, 251
Nuremberg speech (Sept. 9, 1938),
120

oratory, 8, 15
Papen, meeting with, 89
Poland seized by. (Sec Poland)
power, personal sources of, 12
rise to, 30 ff.

President and (Chancellor, 59, 255, 412

propaganda, 28

quoted, 20, 71, 131, 139

religion, attitude toward, 9-1 1

Rhineland coup, 82

Roehra, arrest of, 55-57

Rome, visit to, 85, 109-110

and Schuschnigg, 105-107, III

spy, Reichswehr, 81

stamina, 13

Streicher, opinion of, 76
sub-leaders, 60-81
successor to, 19, 255
terror, use of, iS-i^
visit to Venice, loi
vote of confidence, 9881%, 83
women, attitude toward, 7-8
(Sec also Germany, Nazis)

Hitler, Alois (Schicklgruber), 21-23
Hitler, Alois, Junior, 22
Hitler, Paula, 21-22
Hitler Jugend, 78
Hitlerism, 17-18, 30 ff-
Hoare, Sir Samuel, 274 ff-, 292, 312,
340 ff.

Hoare-Laval plan, i 8 q, 278-280, 341 , 343
Hodza, Prime Minister Milan, 114 435
Hoffman, Heinrich, 76
Hohenberg, Archduke Max, no

INDEX

592

Holland, 85-88, 502, 514
mobilizes, 140
peace offer, 140
Holtzman, 554
Holzweber, 404-405, 409, 41 1
Hoover, Herbert, 170, 186
Hore-Behsha, Leslie, 312, 343 if.

Horne, Sir Robert, 31/

Horst Wessel song, 59
Horthy, Admiral Nicholas, 415, 419,
421 ff

Hotel Matignon, 160
Hottinguer, Baron, 168
House of Commons, 282, 299 ff , 315
House of Lords, 282-283, 291-292, 358
Houston, Lady, 303, 334
Howe, Quincy, World Dtary, 194
HudI, 406, 409
Hugenberg, Dr , 40, 43 - 44 , 47
Humanite, 179
Humpel, Hofrat, 405
Hungary, 129-130, 342, 386 iff., 418 ff.,
436, 452, 461

demands Czechoslovak territory, 125
land problem, 421
minorities, 112-113, 125-126
Huttler, Johanna, 22
Huxley, Aldous, 216
Hyde, Dr. Douglas, 376

Iceland, 505
Ileana, Princess, 444
I L,P. (Independent Labour Party),
355 ff., 361

Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., 174
Imperialism, British, 275-27^ 290, 310,
328, 362

German, 30-31, 93, ii4, 128, 383, 513
Italian, 254-270, 512
Japan, 513
United States, 275
Imredy, Dr Bela, 425
India, 99, 275-276, 285, 293, S19, 325-
326, 364

bill, 289-290, 328, 331
British route to, 275-276, 278
Indian Statutory Commission, 360
Inflation, France, 164, 169
Germany, 32

Inge, Very Rev. W. R., 277-278, 289

Ingrid, Princess, 498

Indnu, Ismet (Ismet Pasha), 482-483

Inquest on Peace, 276
Inquisition, 216
Inskip, Sir Thomas, 348
International Brigade, 214, 224-225
International, Communist, new policy,
210

Second, 208, 229, 391
Third, 185

International Labor Office, 77
International Students Exchange, 51
Iraq, 194, 328
Ireland, 345, 366 ff.

Irjsh Free State, 366, 371-376
Irish Republican Army, 376
Iron Guard, 442-443, 445 ff.

Ironside, General Sir Edmund, 136, 346
Irwin, I^rd {See Halifax, Lord)

Ismet Pasha. {See Indmu, Ismet)
Isolationism, British, 293
Isvest%a, 518, 556, 567
Italian Tyrol, 86
Italo-Turkish war, 1911-12, 240
Italy, 157, 180, 437
Abyssinia, treaty with, 273
Albania, seizure by, 470-471
Anti-Comintern Pact, 84-85, loi, 138,

179

Austria supported by, 416 ff.
birth-rate, 175
expansionist, 513

Fascism {See Fascism; Mussolini)
and Jugoslavia, 466-467
Locarno treaties. {See Locarno)
London, treat of, 269-270, 272
national income, 284 ^

Spain, intervention in, 213 ff., 222-
226, 249

Stresa Front, 88, 177
and Turkey, 482
Ivens, A. W., 365

Jackson, Hampden, 461
Japan, loi, 142, 180, 263, 269, 275, 277,
313, 517, 552, 555 ff., 572
Anti-Comintern Pact, 84
expansionism, 513
in Manchuria, 177
truce with Russia, 139
Jaures, Jean, 158-159
Jeans, Sir James, 347
Jedrejewicz, Janusz, 485
Jefferson, Thomas, 217, 219

INDEX

593

Jeritza, 380

Jerome, Leonard W., 323
Jerrold, Douglas, 284
Jerusalem, 92

Jesuit order, 216, 218, 234, 537
Jesus, a Jew, lo-ii
Jeunesses Patriotes, 206
Jews, in Austria, 70, 110-113, 297, 390
in England, 364-365
in France, IS7

in Germany, 2-17, 30-31, 42, 64 ff., 113

in Hungary, 423-424

in Italy, 262

Portugal, 344

in Rumania, 440 ff.

Russia, 200, 538, S43» SSI
Joesten, Joachim, 499
Joffre, Marshal, 197-19S
Jones, Bettina Shaw, 21 1
Jorga, Nicholas, 444
Jouhaux, Leon, 211-212
Journal des Debats, 171
Juarez, Bemto, 236

Jugoslavia, 85, 177-178, 270, 342, 370,
387, 427, 435-436, 453 ff*, 461 ff , 512
Jugoslav-Hungarian conflict (i934), 5o8
Juliana, Princess, 505
Jime 30 murders, 14, 16, 26, 50 ff., 72,
102, 240, 246, 542
Jung, Edgar, 51, 90
Junkers, 34 ff*, 45
Jutland, battle of, 345

Kaganovitch, 518, S21, 532, 534 ff.

Kah^ General von, 51
Kaiserhof Hotel, 5, 12
Kalinin, 538
Kalinin, Madame, 546
Kalinin, Michael Ivanovitch, 546-547
Kallio, Kyosti, president of Finland, 492
Kamal Ataturk, 24-25. 27, 235-236, 366-
367, 477 ff.

Kamanev, 517, 523, 538, 551 ff-
Kaplan, Fanny, 549
Karageorgeovitch family, 455 ff*

Karl, Emperor, 418-419, 424
Karl Marx Hof, 296, 389-391
“Karlsbad” demands, Henlein's, 116-117,
121

Karolyi, Count Julius, 421-422
Karolyi, Michael, 424
Karolyi family, 421

Karwinsky, 403 ff.

Kasprzycki, General Thaddeus, 485
Kehistein, 6

Keitel, General Wilhelm von, 80, 103, 106

Kellogg Pact, 321

Kemal Ataturk (Sec Kamal)

Kent, Duchess of (Princess Marina),
457, 476

Keppler, Wilhelm, 97
Kerr, Philip (Lord Lothian), 294
Keynes, J. M., 166, 289
Keyser, Jacques, 148, 151
Kiev, 200
Killinger, 16

King's Party, idea of, 302 ff.

Kipling, Rud>ard, 314, 352, 435*436
Kirov, Sergei Mironovitch, 460, 549*550,
553

Kitchener, General Herbert, 322, 326,
332

Klagges, Dietrich, 29
Klausner, Dr. Erich, 51-52
Knickerbocker, H. R., 15, 19, 95» 269,
522, 56s

Knox, Geoffrey, 508
Knyazev, train-wrecker, 557
Koc, Col. Adam, 485
Koerner, General, 393*394
Kollontay, Alexandre, 546
Koltzoff, Michael, 567
Konar, spy, 549
Kondylis, 475
Korbel, 394
Kork, General, 560
Koroshetz, Father, 458
Krestmsky, 520
Kreuger crash, 500

Kroupskaya, Nadiezda, widow of Lenin,

546

Krupp, 173

Krylenko, Madame, 546
Kulaks, 526-527, 529, 542
Kun, Bela, 424, 464
Kunze, 397, 409, 4ii

Labor, 10, 35, 38, 296
British, 286, 289, 350* (See also Labour
Party)

German, 27, 77*78, 95, 98
Italy, 239 ff., 259
Scandinavian, 500 ff.

INDEX

594

Labor — ( Continued)

Spain, 229
under Fascism, 252
Labour Party (British), 294, 306, 320,
328 334 ff., 355

Labour Party, Irish, 373
Laidoner, General, 492
Latsses’^faire capitalism, 348
Lambrino, Zizi, 439
Lammers, Dr Hans, 103
Land, in Germany, 13
Spain, 215 ff.

in U S.S.R., nationalized, 566
Lansbury, George, 357
Lasla, Harold T., 289, 294, 313, 318, 569
Lateran Treaty (1929), 243
Latvia, 492-493

Lausanne Conference, 190, 245, 262, 381-
382

Lausanne Treaty, 481-482
Laval, Jose (Comtesse de Chambrun),
188

Laval, Pierre, 151, 161, 164, 170, 179-
190, 195-196, 210, 274, 27s, 341, S3S,
573

Law, Bonar, 291, 310, 315, 3i7 ff-, 354
“Law of Political Responsibilities,** 226
Lawrence, Colonel T., 246, 362
Layton, Sir Walter, 289
UHumamtif 159
Le Journal, 220
Le Populatre, 159
Le Temps, 171

Leader Principle (FUhrer Prinsip), 16-
17, 50, 61, 206

League of Nations, 17, 83, 172, 177, 189-
190, 237, 293, 342, 350, 437, 459, 494,
496, 507, 544-545
and Spanish republic, 217
Article 16, 510
Assembly, 45 1

Covenant, 176, 274-275, S07-S08, 510
four periods, 509-510
Peace Palace, 510
regional pacts within, 178
sanctions, 276-280

League of Nations Reconstruction Loan
(Austria), 381

League of Nations Union, 278
Lebensraum, 131
Lebrun, Albert, 152
Lee, Jennie, 360

Left groups, 53, 515
England, 294, 355 ff.

France, 153 ff., 162 ff , 179, 183 ff.
Germany, 98
Spain, 214 ff-, 229-231
Leibstandarten, Hitler*s bodyguard, 57
Leipzig, 46, 312
Leipzig, cruiser, 233
Leiter, Levi, 363
Lemaitre, Jules, 158
Lenin, 235-236, 256, 361, 486, 516 ff.,
536, 543, 547, 551, 563
Quirchiirs view, 329
quoted, 355, 562
shooting of, 549
Stalin and, 524, 531
tomb, 532

Lenin, Nadiezda Kroupskaya, 546

Lemngrad, 134

Leonding, 20, 23-24

Leopold II, King of the Belgians, 197

Leopold III, King of the Belgians, 504

Lerroux, Don Alejandro, 220, 227, 230

Lester, Sean, 509

Ley, Dr. Robert, 19, 72, 77-78

Liberals, in England, 277, 327, 350 ff.,

515

Spain, 214 ff.

Libya, 188, 277
Lichterfelde barracks, 57
Liebknecht (Karl) house, 43
Life, 215, 221
Ling, no

Lippmann, Walter, ii
Lipski, M., 144

Lithuania, 83, 85, 131, 486-487, 492-494
Little Entente, 87, 128, 177, 426, 435 ff.,
451-452, 466, 491

Litvinov, Maxim Maximovitch, 115, 297,
361, 482, 538, 543, 570, 573
Livshitz, 555

Llano, General Don Gonzalo Queipo de,
228

Lloyd George, David, 239, 275, 289, 294,
310-312, 317, 327, 349-350, 354, 367,
373-374, 481, 530
Lloyd, Lord, 362

Locarno Treaties, 82, 176, 156, 245, 293,

504, S09

Lockhart, Bruce, 544
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 508

INDEX

London, 89-90, 1 19-120, 126, 282, 287 ff.
City, 337

mock trial, Reichstag fire, 45
secret treaty of, 269-270, 272
Silver Jubilee, 291
London Dmly Herald, 245, 335, 365
London Daily Telegraph, 279
London Economic Conference, 384
London Evening News, 258
London Naval Conference, 279
London News Chromcle, 223
London Observer, 228
London Times, 56, 70, iii, 134, 224-225,
229, 246, 277-279, 287 ff., 31 1, 315,
329, 339, 509
abdication crisis, 299 ff.

Czechoslovak crisis, 118
Londonderry, Lady, 386
Londonderry, Lord, 319
Lorraine, 173, 175
Lorsar, 173

Lothian, Lord (Kerr, Philip), 294

Louis XIV, 176, 443

Louis Philippe, 167

Low, David, 280, 289

Low, Ivy, 545

Low, Sir Sidney, 545

Loyalists, Spain, 213 ff.

Ludwig, Emil, 243 ff., 256, 460
Lupescu, Magda, 438 ff.

Luquet, 167
Lutze, 55
Luxembourg, 505
Lyautey, Marshal, 204, 206
Lybia, 241, 259

Macaulay, Lord, 58, 213
MacDermott, 371
Macdonald, G. B., 314
MacDonald, Malcolm, 312
MacDonald, Ramsay, 189, 287-288, 291,
312, 320-321, 334 ff., 348-349
Hitler, sees danger of, 339
opposes war, 334
prime minister, 335 ff.
quoted, 334, 338, 355-356
MacDonough, 371
Macedonia, 459, 467, 473-474
Mackensen, Field-Marshal von, 52
Madariaga, Salvador de, 216

595

Madrid, 216-217, 220-231
fall, 226
siege, 222, 224
Maginot Line, 119, 518
Maglione, Monsignor, Papal Nuncio* 162
Magna Charta, 303
Magnesite, 108
Magnitogorsk, 518, 564
Magyars, 426
Maisky, 134
Malaga, 221, 224, 229
Mallarnie, 158
Mallet, Ernest, 168
Malta, 277, 290
Maltoni, Rosa, 236

Manchester Guardian, 55, 100, 217, 263*

2271, 358-359, 400

Manchuria, 177, 180, 277, 350, 572 ff
Mandel, Georges (Jeraboam Roth-
schild), 195

Maniu, Juliu, 440, 442, 447 ff.
Mannerheim^ General, 492
Manolescu, Colonel, 450
Maranon, Dr. Gregario, 216
Marburg speech, Papen's, 68-69, 90-91
March, Julian, 220

March on Rome, 37, 239, 255-256, 261,
412

Marek, 400

Maria Jose, Princess, 257
Marie, Queen of Rumania, 439, 444-446,
453

Marinetti, F. T., 270-271
Markiewitz, Countess, 367
Marlborough, Duke of, 333
Marne, first battle of, 197-198
Marquet, Adrien, 161, 208
Marsh, Sir Edward, 330-331
Marx, Karl, 158-159, 238, 247, 361, 378 ,
562

Marx-Lenin dogma, 521
Marxists, 17, 28, 31, 214, 230, 308, 486,
518, 568

Mary, Queen, 303-304, 3o6
Masaryk, Herbert, 430
Masaryk, Jan, 431

Masaryk, Thomas Garrigue, 245, 4^8 ff.

quoted, 428, 430
Masefield, John, 120
Matchek, Vladimir, 457, 466
Matin, 158
Matsoaka, 350

INDEX

596

Matteotti, murder of, 239-240, 258, 261,
356

Matzelberger, Franzika, 21
Maud’huy, Bertrand de, 205
Mauras, Charles, 207
Maurin, Joaquin, 230
Maximilian, Emperor, 236
Maxton, James, 336, 361-362
Mayerling, 418
Means Test, 339, 348, 359
Mechanized war, 281, 344
Mediterranean, 223, 232-234, 251, 258,
298-299

and Spanish War, 140, 213, 313
control by Great Britain, 270, 276, 330
Mehraed VI, Sultan, 478-479
Mem Kampfj 8-17, 68, 76, 87, 102, 130,

245

theme, 31
Meissner, 33-34
Memel, 13 1, 494
Mencken, H. L , 297
Menzhinsky, 549
Mercier, Ernest, 205
Mestrovic, 431
Metaxas, General, 475
Mettemich, 378
Mexico, 91, 217, 274, 556
Mezhlank, creator of Five-Year Plan,

561, 564

Michael, Prince, of Rumania, 440, 444-
445, 453

Middle class, 214, 286, 309, 463-464
Miedzinski, Boguslav, 485
Mihailov, Ivan, 459, 473
Miklas, President, 393-394, 407
Mikoyan, 53^-539
Militarism, German, 83-87, 176
Millerand, 182-183
Milton, John, quoted, 100
Minorca, 225

Minorities, 112-118, 426, 452, 494
Balkan, 437
Czech, 129, 434
German, 1 12-113
Hungarian, 125-126, 426
Polish, 125-126
pre-war, 512
treaties, 112
Mirabaud, Paul, 168
Mirabaud, Pierre, 168
Mirsky, 35S

Mittel-Europa, 383
Mohrenschild, von, 50
Mola, General, 228

Molotov, Premier, 528, 535 ff, 547-548,
551, 555, 558

Molotov, Pauline Semyonova, 546
Montespan, Madame de, 443
Moors, in Spam, 218 ff.

Moravia, 129
Mbravska-Ostrava, 130
Moret, Clement, 167, 169
Morgan, loans to Mussolini, 239
Mormng Post, 274
Morocco, 203-204, 214 if , 221 ff,
Morrison, Herbert, 356-357
Morrison, W. S., 312, 345
Moscicki, Ignacy, 489
Mosely, Sir Oswald, 303, 362-365
Moscow, 49, 93, 134, 137-138, 360, 524 ff.
Communist Internationale Congress
(1935), 573

treason trial. (See Russian purges)
Motta, Dr. Giuseppe, 506
Mowrer, Edgar Ansel, 16, 163, i8o-i8i,
509

Mrachkovsky, 554

Muff, General, 105

Muller, Ludwig, 10, 79

Mumm, champagne manufacturer, 205

Munch, Dr., 499

Munich, 5, 8, 46, 51 ff , 66, 73, 93, loi,
132, 140, IS4 ff., 177, 193, 196
beer hall Putsch, 3-4, 27, 51, 62, 64,

415, 424

crisis, 1 18, 127 ff., 208, 313, 347, 426,
433

Munitions industry, 164, 168, 170
Munters, Wilhelm, 493
Muralov, 555
Mussert, A. A., 505
Mussolini, Anna Maria, 242, 244
Mussolini, Arnaldo, 242, 244
Mussolini, Benito, 2, 5, 9, 13, 37, 66, 86-
87, 103, 106 ff., 121 ff, 151 ff., 177,
223, 235 ff., 321, 398
Abyssinian invasion, 119, 268 ff
and Austria, 102, 108-109, 384-385
characteristics, 14, 24-27, 241 ff.
evades military service, 236-237
founds Fascists, 238 ff.
insurance against assassination, 12
Laval agreement, 188

INDEX 597

Mussolini, Benito — (^Continued)
^‘liquidation’' of Austrian socialists,
386, 396

March on Rome. {See March on
Rome)

megalomania, 24

opposes Habsburg restoration, 420
power, ambition for, 247
psychograph, 250

quoted, 235, 240-241, 248-249, 253-233,
268, 460

socialism, 236-238, 250
visit to Hitler, 85, 10 1
Mussolini, Donna (Rachele Guidi), 241-
242

Mussolini, Edda, 63, 242, 244-247
Mussolini, family, 242
Mussolini, Romano, 242, 263-264
Mussolini, Vittorio, 242

Napoleon, 114, 166-167, 241-242, 246,
250-251, 275, 576
Napoleon III, 167
Nation, 185

“National Government” in England,
320, 328, 334 348, 350, 356, 358

ff.

election, 288, 359-3^0
“National honor,” 271
National Peasant Party, Rumania, 447
ff.

National Socialism. {See Nazi party;
Naziism)

National Union of Ex-Service Men
^France), 203

Nationalism, 269, 417, S 09 ff-, SI 4
Balkan, 471
French, 178, 183

German, 9 ff-, 30-31, 72 , 89, 92, 98,
178

Hungary, 418, 424-426
Irish, 370, 431
Italian, 237-238, 241
Norway, 497
Poland, 484 ff*, 490 ff*

Russia, 263, 574
Spain, 223
Sweden, 496
Turkey, 479 , 481

Nationalist party, German, 40, 42, 73 ,
7 S ff , 90

“Nationalists,” pro-Franco, 214

“Nationalities Statute,” Czechoslovakia,
116-117

Nazi party, Germany (N.S.DA.P), I,
7 , 27, 92

June 30 murders, 14, 16, 26, 50 ff., 72,
102, 240, 246, 542
mass meetings, 67

Nuremberg congress. {Sec Nurem-
berg Congress)
organs, 9

Reichstag fire. {See Reichstag fire)
rise to power, 13-14, 30 ff.

Naziism, 267
and capitalism, 99
Dutch, 50s

in Austria, 18, 105 ff., 381
in Czechoslovakia, 114 ff., 129
in Danzig, 135-136
in Germany. {See Nazi party)
program, 28
revolution, 3, 9 -ii
“Socialist” elements, 77, iii
state, IS

Switzerland, 506
terror. {See Terror)
world. Hitler’s hope, 84
Near East, 104, 15 1
Negrin, Dr. Juan, 225-226, 231
“Neo-socialists,” 161, 208
N.E.P. (New Economic Policy), 526
Netherlands, 502, 504 ff. {See also
Holland)

Neudeck, 34, 36

Neuflize, Baron Jacques de, 168
Neumann, Dr , no

Neurath, Baron Constantine von, 36, 61,
85, 89-90

“Protector” of Bohemia-Moravia, 103
Neustaedter-Stiirmer, Baron Odo, Jio-
III, 405 ff.

Neutrality, 213, 49 ^ ff-, 504

New Leader, 276

New Life, 543

New Republic, 271-272, 527

New Statesman, 120, 283, 351, 35 ^

New York Herald Tribune, no, 403
New York Sun, 228, 274
New York Times, loi, 131, 138 - 139 ^
258, 323, 402, 503
New Yorker, 275
News Chronicle, 12, 357

INDEX

598

Newspapers, Balkan, 467
British, 289, 3CX), 331
French, 179-180
German, 67, 69, 92, 116, 125
Italian, 245-246
Nicholas, Prince, of Rumania, 443-444,

450

Nicholas II, Tsar, 341
Nietzsche, 236, 248-249, 487
Nikalaeva, Klavdiya Ivanovna, 546
Nikolaiev, Leonid, 550
Nin, Andres, 230
Noli, Monsignor Fan, 469-470
Non-aggression pact,
German-French-Belgian, 83
German-Polish, 133, 138 if.
Polish-Soviet, 491
Non-aggression pacts, 83, 133
Non-intervention, 154, 225, 231 ff., 330,
574

Nordic m3rth, 69

Norman, Montague Collet, 291, 351 ff.
North Sea, 119
Norway, 497 ff.

Nuremberg, 3-4, 10, 76, 120
laws against Jews, 70
Nazi congress (Parteitag)^ 73, 75,
118

Nygaardsvold, Johan, 502
Nypels, George, 245
Nyon, Conference, 233-234
Nypels, 403

Oberfohren, deputy, 45

Obrenovitch, Alexander, King of Serbia,

456, 464

Observer, 134, 287, 321
O^Connell, Kathleen, 369
Ogmok, 567
Oil, 278, 280
Dutch, 504
Rumanian, 452

Olaf, Crown Prince of Norway, 498
Oligarchy, “Deux Cents,” 166 ff., 200.

{See also Banque de France)
Ormsby-Gore, Mr , 290
Osinsld, 564
"Oslo group,” SOS
Osthilfe relief scandals, 38
"Ostmark,” no
Ottawa agreements, 337, 350
Ou«tric bank scandal, 194

Oususky, M., 122

Oxford and Asquith, Countess of, 289
Oxford, 74, 286, 290, 326, 342-344

Pacelli, Elisabetta and Giuseppina, 265
Pacelli, Eugenio Cardinal (Pope Pius
XII), 264-267
first Encyclical, 267
Pacelli, Francesco, 265
Pacifism, 30-31, 42, 172, 185, 339
British, 290, 335, 339, 343, 347
Paderewski, Ignace Jan, 190, 489
Paglnism, 10, 77

Pahlevi, Reza, Shah of Persia, 346
Painleve, Paul, 160, 186
Palatinate, 71
Palestine, 104, 276, 370
Pamplona, 229
Pan-Germanism, 86, 130
program, Germans outside Reich, 90
propaganda, 72

Papen, Franz von, 4, 31-52, 86, 105, 41 1,

417

chancellor, 36-38

expelled from United States, 91-92
Marburg speech, 68
Paris, 82, 86, 120
peace conference, 263
street riots, 68

Parliament, British, supremacy of, 282

if., 303

{See also House of Commons ; House
of Lords)

France, 200
Parrottj tutor, 453
Patriotism, Ltd , 174
Paul, Regent, of Jugoslavia, 454, 457 ff.
Paul-Boncour, Joseph, 182, 192-193
Pax Britannica, 293
Peace, forces for, 513 ff.

“Peace Ballot,” 278
“Peace in our Time,” 123
“Peace offensive,” xvi
Peace Plan, 1936, 82-84
Pearce, Padraic, 371
Peasants, Spain, 214 ff.

Prussian, revolt against Five-Year
Plan, 527 ff

Pehrsson, Axel, Bramstorp, 500
Perovitch, Ivan, 458
Pertinax, 109
Petain, Marshal, 178

INDEX

599

Peter I, King of Jugoslavia, 456, 464

Peter II, King of Jugoslavia, 453 ff.

Peter the Great, 478

Petite bourgeoisie, 32

Petrograd, 455

Pieracki, 460

Pietsch, Albert, 97

PHsudski, Josef, 20, 24-25, 235, 256, 484

ff, 493-494
Pitt, William, 282
Pius XI, Pope, 264, 266, 38s
Pius XII, Pope, 264-267
Planetta, Otto, 407, 411-412, 460
Plebiscites, 17, 83, 107, in, 122, 127-
128, 475

“Peace Ballot,” 278
{See also Saar)

Poelzl, Ellara, 21-24
Poincare, Raymond, 151, 155, 161, 183,
186, 189-190, 193, 199
Poland, 19, 86, 93, 119, 177-178, 197,
425-426, 484 ff., 512, 515
Anglo-French pledge to, 132-133
demands on Czechoslovakia, 125-126,
129

German minorities, 113
Germany invades, xvi, 42, 65, 128,
138 ff., 144, 177, 266
Hitler’s demands, 131 flF.

Ironside mission, 346
mobilization, 142

non-aggression pact, German, 2, 139
Russian invasion, 491
sixleen points, 143-144
Poles, minorities, 112
Police, German (Gestapo), 73-76
Polish Corridor, 13, 86, 431, 491, 494,
511 ff.

Polish-Soviet non-aggression treaty, 491
Politburo, 521, 523, 536 ff.

Pollitt, Harry, 361
Pommer, Josef, 20
Pope, the, peace appeal, 140
Popolo d* Italia, 238, 242, 246, 259
Popov, 46-47
Popular Front, 139, 573
France. {See Front Populaire)

Spain, 219, 221 ff.

Portugal, 215, 221, 232, 234, 290, 344
Potsdam, 76

Poulenc, Camille, 168
POUM. (Party of Marxist Unifica-
tion), 230-231
Poynter, Sir Edward, 314
Prague, 115 ff., 129-130, 133, 333, 430 ff.
Praval, 177

Pravda, 137, 518, 523, 563, 567
Precup, Colonel Vladimir, 442, 449-450
Press, British, 334, 337
Czechoslovak, 434
French, 164, 179-180
German, 67-69, 12, 134 ff., 142
Italian, 104, 246
Polish, 136

{See also Newspapers)

Pressard, M., 165, 201
Price, Ward, 274
Price-fixing, 77
Prieto, Indelacio, 230
Prince, Dr, 202
Princip, 465
Probst, Adelbert, 51
Production for use, 565
Profit, in Russia, 565-568
Propaganda, 10, 85, 384
art as, 72
Czech, 434
English, 288

German, 28, 67-69, 72, 129, 384, 398,

Italian, against Britain, 104
and Spanish civil war, 213-214
Protestants, 9-10, 17
Proust, Marcel, 156, 341
Prudhon, 159
Prussia, 37, 61, 72, 81
Prystor, Col. Aleksander, 485, 487
P.S.F. (Parti Social Frangais), 206
Pujo, Maurice, 207
Punch, 290

Putna, General, 559-560
Pyatakov, 552 ff.

Quandt, 66

Race, doctrine of, 17, 267
Radek, Karl, 532, 552 ff., 570 ff.
quoted, 572

Radical Socialist party, France, 148 ff.,
189

INDEX

600

Radio, 10, 67, 104, 1 19, 144, 228, 308,
383, 386, 395
Churchiirs address, 333
Dollfuss putsch, 399 ff
Edward VIII’s farewell, 296, 304-30S
Raditch, 462-463
Raeder, Adtniral, 80 ^

Railways, Russian, 539, 542, 557
Rakovsky, 560-561
Rampart, 201
Rastikas, General, 493
Rath, vom, shooting of, 70
Rathenau, 424

Raupel, Angela (Hitler), 22
Raw materials, 85, 99, 513
Reading, Lord, ii
Rearmament, 78, 95
German, 88, 328

Great Britain, 289, 294-295, 312-313,
332, 356
Holland, 505
Scandinavian, 500
Swiss, 506

Red Army, 538-539, 542, 549, 559-S6o,

563 ff.

Reed, Douglas, 42-43
Reformation, 10
Reichsbank, 97, 99
Reichstag, 4, 34-35, 37, 72, 132
Reichstag fire, 17, 41-46, 76
mock trial, London, 45
trial, 46-50

Reichswehr, 18-19, 27-28, 33, 36, 40 ff.,
72, 80-82, 467
oath to Hitler, 59
oppose Austrian invasion, 105
“peace” strength, 78
and Red Army, 560
Reinhardt, Max, 412
Renard, Jules, 157-158, l6l
Renaudel, 161
Renner, Dr, 382
Renoult, 201
Rentenmark, 97-98
Rentier class, 169

Reparations, 35, 86, 176, 190, 262, 511 ff.
moratorium, 378
to Sudetens, 116

Republic, German. (See Weimar Re-
public)

Republicans, German, 17
Spanish, 214, 229, 231

Reval, 93

Revue Blanche, 158
Revue des Deux Mondes, 193
“Rexists,” 504
Reynaud, Paul, 195
Rheinmetall, 173
Rhine River, 108
Rhineland, 17, 66, 88, 511 ff.

^evacuation, 86, 177
Hitler occupies, 13, 82, 86
Ribbentrop, Fraulein von, 89
Ribbgntrop, Joachim von, 6, 19, 61,
83 ff., 103, 109, 120, 133, 142-144,
258, 297

accuses Poles of invasion, 144
London, ambassador to, 89
reads sixteen points, 143-144
visits Russia, 135 ff.

Ribes, Champetier de, 148
Richthofen, 62
Rickett, Francis W., 273
Riff, the, 214
Rightists, Austrian, 385
English, 355 ff.

French, I53-I54, 163, 179, 183 ff.
Rintelen, Captain von, The Dark In-
vader, 91

Rintelen, “King Anton,” 397 ff., 410 ff.
Rios, Fernando de los, 216, 218
Ripoldi, 412
Rist, Charles, 167
“Ritual Murder,” 75
Rivera, Primo de, 221, 223
Robert, Maitre, 195 ^

Robles, Don Jose Maria Gil, 220, 221,
227

Robotnik, 486

Rochetj M., 184

Roechling, Dr., 173

Roeder, Admiral, 104

Roehm, Ernst, 2, 6, 14, 19, 49 ff., 72, 75

Rogers, Mr. and Mrs., 303

Rohe, Alice, 274

Rome, March on, 37, 239, 255-256, 261,
412

Rome-Berlin axis, 84-85, loi, 106, 179,
248, 258, 262, 425, 458, 515
Romm, Vladimir, 556
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 152-153,
244, 266, 504, 543
peace appeals, 126, 140
Roosevelt, Theodore, 366

INDEX

6oi

Rosenberg, Alfred, 6i, 72, 77, 92-94,
187, 447

Rosengoltz, Madame, 546
Rosenheim, Bavaria, 61-62
Rossoni, Edmondo, 259
Rothermere, Lord, 287, 303
Rothschild, Baron Alfonse de, 168
Rothschild, Baron Edouard de, 168
Rothschild, Louis, no
Rothschild family, 168
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 190, 217, 219
Royalists, French, 179, 183, 191, 197,
202 ff.

Ruhr valley, 31, 87, 190
Rumania, 133, 177 - 178 , 270, 427, 435
512

Rumanians, 113, 426
Runciman, Lord, 118, 121
Russell, Bertrand, 216, 235
Russia, revolution (1917) > 335 > 342, 523,
544 , 569

Allied intervention, 328 ff.

(See also U.S.S.R.)

Russian purges (1936 and 1937 ), 531 ,
535 , 539 , 542, 552 ff.

Russo-Czech security treaty, 179
Russo-German non-aggression pact, 137-
139, 154, 210 ff., 573
Rust, Dr Bernhard, 60, 72
Ruthenes, 129
Ruthenia, 130, 426-427
Rydz-Smigly, General Eduard, 485, 488
Rykov, 517, 530, 547 , 560-561

SA (Sturm Abteilung), 6, IS, 19, 27,
SO ff., 61, 68, 73 ff.

Saar plebiscite, 17, 188, 263
Saar valley, 86, 176-177, 508-509, 5 i 5
Salamanca, 221

Salazar, Dr. Antonio de Oliveira, 234
Salengro, Roger, 163
Salisbury, Lord, 291
Salonika, Greece, 20
Salter, Sir Arthur, 289
Samuel, Sir Herbert, 350
Sanctions, 100, 276-280, 360, 433, 466,
508

Sander, 57

Sanjurjo, General, 218, 223, 226
Santander, 233
Saragossa, 229

Sarajevo, 88, loi, 418, 437, 465

Sarfatti, Margherita, 243
Sarraut, Albert, 182, 193
Sarte, Real del, 207
Saturday Review, 334
Saxons, 93
Saxony, 51

Scandinavia, 85, 96, 492, 496 ff., 514
Schacht, Dr. Hjalmar, 19, 61, 69, 94-
99 , 294, 353
Schaub, 12
Scheffer, Paul, 524
Schicklgruber, Maria Anna, 21
Schirach, Baldur von, 76-77
Schleicher, Elisabeth von, SI, 57
Schleicher, Kurt von, 19, 31 ff., 79, 86
Chancellor, 38
dismissed, 40-41
murder, 51 ff., 72
Schmidt, Edward and Anton, 24
Schmidt, Theresa, 24
Schmidt, Willi, 51-52
Schneider, arms firm, 173
Schneider, Eug^e, 167, 171
Schneider, Hannes, no
Schneider, Willi and Rudi, 22
Schneider-Creusot, 171 ff.

Schneidhuber, August, 51
Schnitzler, no
Schoeber, Dr, 378, 382
School books, German, 72
Schroeder, banker, 40, ^

Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 20, 105 ff., 143^
366

agreement with Germany, 417
arrest, 108
chancellor, 413 ff.

Dollfuss putsch, 395, 406 ff.
Schutzbund, 379, 385 » 392 , 4*6
Second International, 208, 229, 391
Secret International, 174
Security, I7S-I79, 188
Seekt, von, 36, 80

Seipel, Monsignor Ignaz, 381-382, 387*
391, 413 ff.

Seitz, Karl, 394
Seldes, George, 250

Self-determination, 112, 124, 130, 375,
512

“Self-preservation,” 131

Senate commission, arms investigation,

174

6o2

INDEX

Serbia, 370, 456
greater, 464

Serbs, 113, 426, 438, 455 , 457 , 461
Serebryakov, 553 ff.

Serrault, M., 162
Servent, 167
Severing, 37
Seville, 221-222, 229
Seyss-Inquart, Arthur, 106, ill
Shakespeare, 530, 5^8
Sheean, Vincent, no
Shestor, 557

Shkvarkm, Vasily V., 566-567
Siberia, S18, 535, 542-543, S64
Siborski, General, 485
Siegfried, Andre, 182
Siegfried line, 117
Sikorski, Gen. Ladislas, 491
Silesia, 61, 114, 134, 142
Simon, Arlette, 192

Simon, Sir John, 88, 288, 312, 342, 348-
350, 360

Simpson, Ernest Aldrich, 298
Simpson, Mrs. Wallis, 288, 297 if.
Sinclair, Sir Archibald, 350
Sinn Fein, 371 ff.

Skoda, munitions firm, 173-174, 466
Slawek, Col. Valerian, 485, 489
Slocombe, George, 245
Slovakia, 129, 136, 140
Slovaks, 126, 129, 426
Slovenes, 426, 461-462
Smetona, president of Lithuania, 493
Smirnov, 553 ff.

Smith, F. E. (Lord Birkenhead), 314,
318

Snowden, Philip, 193, 334 349, 353
Social Democrats, 35, 37, 42, in, 497
Socialism, Austria, 379 ff
England, 291, 331, 335, 339, 347 ff.,
355 ff.

France, 153, 156 ff., 183 ff.

Italy, 237 ff.

Scandinavia, 500
Spain, 214 ff., 229
Socialists, 10, 17, 30, 37, 44, 62-63
Sokolnikov, 523, 552 ff.

Solidarite Frangaise, 206-207
Sonnemann, Frau Emmy, 63
Sorel, 159, 248

Soznkowski, General Jan, 485, 488-489
Sotelo, Calvo, 221, 226

South America, 77
South Tyrol, 385

Soviet Union. (See Russia; U.S.S.R.)
Spada, bandit, 207
Spain, loi, 133, 5i5, 574
Church. (See Church)
civil war, 312 ff.
constitution, 217
educational program, 217-218
• German and Italian intervention, 85,
103-104

land reform, 217-218
monarchy, fall of, 215-216
non-intervention, 154
republican government, 216 ff.
schools, 217-218

“Special” (Distressed) Areas, Britain,
289

Spencer, Lieutenant Earl W., Jr., 297-
298

Spital, 20-24

Spreti, Hans Edwin von, 51
SS (Schutsstaffel), 12, 18-19, 54-58,
73-74, 108, 397

Stalin, Josef, 7, 9, 20, 24-26, 151, 210,
237, 255, 366, 4x6, 480, 487, 517
548, s6o ff , 563 ff ., 574
aims, 575

characteristics, 13, 53 ff, 243, 530,
531 ff.

early life, 520-523
“imperialist,” 209
job, 521

“joins Anti-Comintern pact,” 138-139,
S73 ff.

peasant revolt, 527 ff.
quoted, 516-518 ff, 535-536, 568
sources of power, 517 ff.

Trotsky, struggle with, 525
U.S S.R., 524
Stambolislsy, 464
Stamp, Lord, 289, 291
Standard Oil, 272
Stankovitch, Radekno, 458
Stanley, Oliver, 348
Starace, Achille, 256, 259
Stargard, Pomerania, 79
Starhemberg, Countess Franziska, 415
Starhemberg, Prince Ernst Rudiger
von, 385 ff, 395, 413 ff.

Stauning, Thorvald, 501-502

INDEX

603

Stavisky, Serge Alexandre, 68, 180
183, 192-194, 200 ff.

(February, 1934) riots, 152, 164-165,
169, 191, 202-203
Steed, Wickham, 313, 315, 318
Steeg, 182

Steer, G. L., 224-225
Steinnick, Dr., 75

Stekel, Dr, Wilhelm, 24-27, 250-251,
460-461

Stelescu, Nicolai, 446-447
Stendhal, 158

Stewart, Lady Maureen, 348
Steyr, munitions industries, 108
Stirbey, Prince, 439
Stockholm peace congress, 335
Stoyadmovitch, Milan, 457, 467
Strachey, John, 363
Strachey, Lytton, 175
Strang, William, 134
Strasser, Gregor, 3, 14, 38-39, 51-52, 73,
78. 93

Strasser, Otto, 7, 205
Strauss, no

Streicher, Julius, 3, 69, 73 ff., 365
‘‘Stresa Front,” 88, 177, 336
Stresemann, 86

Strikes, 154, 162-163, 253, 321, 361
Stroilov, 555
Strones, 21

Sturm Abteilung. {See SA)

Stunner, Der, 75, 83
Stuttgart, congress at, 90
Styria, 387-588, 3977398, 41 1
Submarines, in Mediterranean, 226, 233,

313

Sudeten crisis, 6, 100, 1 13-127, 313
Sudetenland, 86, 135, 139
Suez Canal, 278
Sunday Express, 283, 318, 354
Survey Graphic, 244
Suyitch, Fulvio, 263, 386, 388, 396
Svinhufvud, Pehr Evind, 492
Swastika flag, 28
Sweden, 62-63, 94, 342, 495 ff.
arms exports, 172, 174
peace congress, 186
Swing, Raymond Gram, 32
Swinton, Lord, 345

Switzerland, 85-88, 505 ff., 514, 236-237
Syndicalism, Italian, 253, 259
Spain, 214 ff., 229-230

Syria, 151, 176, 370
Syrovy, General, 123

Taittinger, Pierre, 206
Talaat, 480
Tanev, 46-47
Tannery, Jean, 169

Tardieu, Andr6, 157, 182, 186, 193-195,
201, 206
Tarragona, 225
Tatarescu, George, 451
Teleki, Count Paul, 425
Temps, 193-194

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, quoted, 119
Ter-Vaganyan, 554

Terror, use of, Austria, no, 386, 396,
416

Germany, 15-16, 30, 42, 50 ff., 73-76,
263, 294

Hungary, White, 423-424
in Italy, 249
in Russia, 549
Spain, 218, 228
Teruel, 225
Teschen, 125, 129
Theresienfeld, 21

Thomas, J. H. (^‘Jinimy”), 349 * 364

Thomas, Norman, 153

Thompson, Dorothy, 10, 15, 98, 187, 269

Thorez, Marcel, 152, 163, 209-212

Thyssen, Fritz, 32

Tiflis, Georgia, 522

Time, 75, 455, 503

Tinardon, M, 168

Tmglef, Schleswig, 97

Tirana, treaties of, 470

Tiso, Dr,, 129, 436

Titianu, 444

Titulescu, Nicolas, 442-443, 45i> 474,

51 1

Tokyo, 102
Toledo, 221-222
Tolstoy, 430
Tomalevsky, 459
Tomsky, 517, 547
Torgler, Ernst, 45, 47
Tories, England, 280, 287, 292-294,
312 ff., 334 , 340, 343 , 347 ff., 358
Torlonia, Prince, 241
Totalitarian states, 85, 227, 234, 253-
254, 266-267

Town Labourer, The, 363

INDEX

604

Trade, British, 284 ff
Trade Union Law (1927), 318
Trade unions, 38, 77-78, IS3, 231, 252 ff ,
294, 355, 357, 359, dSs, 392 ff , 501 ff.
Trades Disputes Act (1927), 359
Transylvania, 126, 452-453
Treaties,

Abyssinia tripartite agreement, 272
Anglo-Franco-Turkish, 197
Anglo-French naval compromise, 321
Anglo-German naval agreement, 133,
177, 294, 499
Balkan Pact, 270
Brest-Litovsk, 559
Franco-Czech security, 179
Franco- Russian non-aggression
(1932), 190

Franco-Soviet pact, 125, 177 ff., 452,

560, 573

Irish (1921), 370, 372
Italo- Abyssinian (1928), 273
Lateran (1929), 243
Lausanne, 190, 481-482
Locarno, 245, 504, 509
London, secret, 269-270, 272
Munich, 127-128

Polish-German non-aggression, 133,
491

Russo-Czech mutual assistance pact,
435, 573

Russo-Czech security, 179
Russo-German (1925), 544
Russo-German non-aggression pact,
137-139, 210 ff
Russo-Japanese truce, 139
Russo-Norwegian (1925), 544
Tirava, 470
Trianon, 125, 426
Triple Alliance, 269
Versailles {See Versailles)
Trevelyan, 292-293
Treviranus, Gottfried, 58
Trianon treaty, 125, 426
Trieste, 385

Tripartite agreement, Abyssinia, 272
Triple Alliance, 269
Trotsky, 31. 73 , 233, 237. 3 SS. SI 7 ff-,
541, 539
and Hitler, 552
quoted, 247, 249
struggle with Stalin, 525 ff.
theory, 525

Trotsky, Sedov, 554 ff
Trotsl^ists, 208, 231, 550, 552 ff.

Tsana, Lake, 272-273

T. U.C. (Trade Union Congress), 359 if,
Tuka, Bela, 436

Tukhachevsky, Marshal, 552, 559-560
Tunis, 268, 270
Turati, Augusto, 259
Turkey, 90, 92, 133, 151, 173-174, 194,
- 268, 270, 299, 370, 474, 477 ff.
Turner, W. J., quoted, 30
Tyrol, 388, 414
Sobth, German minorities, 113
Tyrrell, Lord, 291
Tzanhov, Professor, 473-474

Uborovitch, General, 559-560
Udet, 62

U. G.T. (Union General de Trabaja-

dores), 229

Uhl, 51

Ukraine, 93, 527-528, 555, 559, 575
Ulmanis, Dr. Karlis, 493
Ulnch, V. V., 553
Ulster, 373

Umberto, Crown Prince, 256-257, 260
Unamuno, Miguel de, 216, 220
Unemployment, 13, 94-95, 238, 286, 338,

392, 564

Union of Democratic Control, 174
Union Europeenne, 173
Union Nationale des Combattants, 207
United Front, 191-192, 21 1, 358, 360-
361, 416, 515

United States, 91, 96, 321 ^

and League, 513
arms exports, 172
imperialism, 275
Manchurian crisis, 350
recognizes U.S.S R., 544, 572-573
supports franc, 164

United States of Europe, 248, 433, 515
U.S S.R., 61, 73, 83 ff , 93, 96, 115, 119,
126, 178-179, 255 ff , 268, 333, 340-
343, 356, 427, 516 ff.
aid to Spanish loyalists, 213 ff., 224,
232

and Baltic states, 494
and Turkey, 268, ^2
Anglo-French relations, 133 ff.
Constitution, 570 ff
Czech mutual assistance pact, 435

INDEX

U.S.S R — (Continued)
famine (1933), 5^7 ff*
foreign policy, 572 ff.

France and Czechoslovakia, agree-
ments, 573

in League of Nations, S44, 573

invades Finland, 492

invades Poland, 133? iS4, 484, 488,

491, 571

jokes about, 571-572
Mumch, effect of, 128
national state, 563
protest to Italy, 233 ,

recognized by United States, 544, 572-
573

Russo-German pact, 137-139, 573
vitality, 562

(^See also Russian purges; Stalin;
Trotsky)

Valdemaras, 493

Valencia, 221-225

Valery, Paul, 158

Van der Lubbe, Marinus, 44-50

Vandervelde, Emile, 503

Vansittart, Sir Robert, 288, 341, 345

Vatican, the, 10

Vaucluse, 147

Vayo, Julio Alvarez, 217

Veltchev, Col. Damien, 473-474

Venice, loi

Venizelos, 437, 475

Verdun, 181

Vereker, General John Standish, Vis-
dbunt Gort, 346
Vernes, Felix, 168
Verona, 66

Versailles Treaty, 13, 31, 52, 72, 78,
86, 112-114, 124, 135, 177, 194, 276,
294, 317, 350, 474, 494, S07 ff., 573
Vickers, arms firm, 173-174
Vienna, 1-2, ii, 22, 24, 62, 106 ff., 377 ff‘»
416

end of parliament, 382
February battle, 379 ff.
gleichgeschaltet, iio-iii

1931 panic, 354
saved from Turks, 415
Vilna, 493-494
Vistula River, 133
Vitkovice, 130

605

Vittorio Emmanuele III, 239, 248, 256-

257

Vogue, M. de, 168
Voigt, F. A., 246

Volkischer Beobachtcr, 9, 28, 81, 92
Volonte, 201

Voronova, Pelegeya Yakovlevna, 546
Voroshilov, 534 ff , 541 ff,, 551
Vremia, 523-

Vyshinsk>% A. Y., 553 ff.

Wagner, Captain, 97
Wagner, Richard, 4
Waldviertel, 21-22
Wales, 296, 307
Walwal incident, 273
War guilt, 86-87, 100, 176, 51 1
War of 1914, 4, n, iS, 25, i59, 178, 198,
220, 237, 256, 260-261, 275, 333 ff.,
345, 361, 465, 484

War of 1939, xiii, 18, 30, 85, 144, 196,
198, 226, 262, 266, 293, 31 1 ff., 328,
332 ff , 365, 376, 387, 429, 433, 437,
485, 489,^ 510, 575
War-mongering, 30
Warnaffe, Vicomte de, 503
Warr, Earl de la, 312
Warsaw, 125, 135 ff , 144, 197, 484 ff.
Warwick, Frances, Countess of, 342
Washington, 91-92
Webb, Sidney, 348, 358
Webb, Mrs Sidney, 358
Well, David, 168

Weimar constitution, 32-33, 35 " 37 f 42
Weimar republic, 30 ff , 86, 90, 217, 265
Weizsacker, Baron von, 135, 138
Wells, H. G, 216-217, 347, 519, 529-531
Weis, Otto, 77-78
Weltanschauung, 72

Wendel, Fran<;ois de, 168, 170, 173, 205
Wendel, Ivan Edouard von, 171
Werner, 403

Werth, Alexander, Frofnce in Ferment,
180, 199

Westminster, Statute of, 292, 337
Westphalia, 91

Weygand, General Maxime, I96-I97»
204, 206

White Paper, of Locarno powers, 84
White Terror, 423-4241 4^4
Wiener Zeitung, 398
Wiessee, $5

6o6

INDEX

Wildemann, Fritz, 6
Wilhelm II, 42, 87, 265, 294
Wilhelmina, Queen, 505
Wilson, Sir Horace, 126-127
Wilson, Woodrow, 294, 355, 366, 429-
430, 490, S07

Windischgraetz, Count, 421
Wise, Frank, 562
Wolf, Otto, 78

Women, Russian, work of, 545-546
Wood, Edward. (See Halifax, Lord)
Wood, Sir Kingsley, 344-345
Woollcott, Alexander, 74
World Court, The Hague, 435
Wrabel, Major, 400, 409

Yagoda, G. G., 549, 560-561
Yague, Colonel, 228
ifakir. General, 559
iTakovleva, Madame V. N., 546
ifbarnegary. Deputy, 206
Yezhov, 549

York, Archbishop of, 308

York, Duke of, 298, 303 ff. (See also
George VI)

Young plan, 97
Youth Movement, 76
Yudenitch, 523

Zaharoif, Sir Basil, 173
Zaleski, August, 491
Zeeland, Paul van, 82, 502 ff.

^ehner, General, 406
Zetland, Marquess of, 312
Zhdanov, Andrey Alexandrovitch, 521,
636, 539, 548
Ziegler, 63
Zimmerman, 91

Zinoviev, 517, 523-524, S38, 55i ff.
letter, 320

Zita, Empress, 418-419 ff.

Zivkovitch, General Peter, 464-466
Zog, of Albania, 468
Zographos, manager of gambling syndi-
cate, 207

Zuckerkandl, Dr., 479-480

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Texts

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Inside Europe"

See other formats